All posts by nouyang

2.007 (aka earn credit for building a robot) – Hexalinkagepod

d’aww, isn’t it cute?

I finished (for small degrees of finish) my simple linkage hexapod robot for 2.007, aka Design and Manufacturing I. This is MIT’s fabled class, from which sprung forth the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is probably the reason I applied to MIT in the first place (go Team 1261!). Building this turned out to be more complicated than I ever imagined. It doesn’t work well, but it’s super cute 😀 Yay for the first robot I ever built from scratch!



Fairly extensive photos from the build process here on picasaweb:

2.007
https://picasaweb.google.com/nancy.ouyang/2007
 (most of timestamps are 2 to 3 days off, and 12 hours off. camera settings fail)

I also wrote some Arduino documentation for my fellow 2.007 students. See
https://sites.google.com/site/2007arduino/getting-started

Edit 4/3/11: A lot more documentation went up recently, so I wanted to note that the only I wrote above page. The rest is the wonderful work of the 2.007 staff.

New Projects Blog

orange narwhals are awesome! I’ll post my CSS modifications to the Blogger template in a bit, and would like to attribute the orange narwhals I used for my background to the Ubuntu Natty Narwhal backgrounds. I’m in the process of moving worthy posts over from nouyang.blogspot.com, which I’m converting into a documentation blog.

IAP 2011: chopsticks and toy top (blacksmithing and MITERS lathe)

IAP!
Blacksmithing is awesome. I had 2 hours of instruction (safety and demo), 1 hour of hands-on time, and then I made these chopsticks in 1.5 hours today. They’re super easy to make. Hot metal has the consistency of clay, and we used modelling clay (or something similar) to model blacksmithing operations.

So, in conclusion, random blacksmithing is not difficult, all you do is heat up the metal and work it.
It’s (a) the setup can be expensive or time-consuming and (b) getting good at blacksmithing takes infinite time.

Also, to learn / refresh on lathe-work, I made two wooden tops.

[2 Feb 2010: Temporary doublepost from http://nouyang.blogspot.com/2011/01/iap-2011-chopsticks-and-toy-top.html as I sort through my posts.]