So many projects, so little time!

The pandemic really changed all of our plans for 2020, but rather than see this as a negative I tried to use the extra free time to take on fun side projects. Below is a collection of some of the larger of these projects - ranging from computer architecture to metal casting, mental health technologies to surgical RFID chips!

I hope you enjoy as much as I did!

Easy-to-assemble canvas chair

Designed for the #diychairchallenge put on by the product designer Nick Baker, this chair was designed to be a beginner-friendly and fun project for people looking to enter the “making” community. Built out of canvas and stretcher bars, the chair features no right angles, helping it to stand out in any room while also being surprisingly comfortable to lounge in!

The use of canvas allows each builder to put their own personal touch on the chair, as you can see by all the different color schemes we chose to highlight on various versions of the chair.

All in all, this project was an excellent chance to flex my creative muscles and dip my toes in industrial product design!

Calmi - A Mental Health App for Digital Learning

As part of MIT’s HealthHack 2020 hackathon, I was part of a team that created Calmi, a simple Chrome extension that empowers students and work-from-home employees to best utilize their breaks between video calls in ways that support physical and emotional wellbeing.

Our app draws from emerging mental health research and proven app designs to create a simple yet functional model. This app was also one of my first times doing front-end web development with Javascript and html, which I found very fun!

Guitar Hero Controller as a Legitimate Instrument - TerribleHack 2020

As part of the TerribleHack 2020 Bad Ideas Hackathon I had the absolute pleasure of creating “Guitar Fear-o,” a guitar hero controller that can act as a MIDI controller or connect directly to a speaker and play notes. This project combined lots of my passions - taking stuff apart to see how it works, digital electronics, loud noises, and splatter paint. What’s not to love?

Eight-bit Breadboard Computer

My longest quarantine project by far has been building and programming an eight-bit computer entirely on breadboards using Youtube and learning as I go. To date I’ve poured about 120 hours into this project and probably have another 40 to 60 to go in order to reach my goal of being able to calculate digits of pi. I’ve learned so much from this project and with all the different colored LEDs the computer really is beautiful to watch.

Following this project, my next goal is to build a 16-bit version capable of running the 1993 video game DOOM, notorious for its low system requirements!

Recreating the 1899 Herreshoff Windlass

Starting in January 2020 and continuing even today, I’ve been working with a small group of machinists and engineers around the MIT community to recreate an icon of twentieth-century maritime - the Herreshoff Windlass anchor mechanism. Working off the original patent drawing from 1899, we have been painstakingly machining each part out of foam before sand casting it in bronze. This has been a wildly fun project due to the expertise of everyone I’ve been working with, the amount of machining involved (which I love), and the amount of molten metal I get to watch poured into my sand flasks!