Tag: engineering

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Maker Lab NW

A lot of creating was going on Sunday, but it was my kids, not me.  We joined a newly formed “cardboard battlebots” club and got started on our kit and getting all the information for programming and controlling the bots loaded (mostly) onto our computer and phones.

Two bots were working by the end of the session and got to duke it out. The bots are randomly assigned an animal and what you see here, is “hookworm”.  Our bot is “goose”.

And while we were poking around the Maker space, we found this really cool idea:  scales 3-D printed onto fabric. We’ve seen scales hand-sewn into gauntlets which looks extremely time consuming, if this works out, it might be a much cheaper way to achieve that effect.

Added: video of the bots fighting.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Mousetrap cars

I lead a 4-H club that is mostly devoted to hiking, kayaking and general outdoorsy stuff, but we sometime dabble in some kid-size engineering projects. In the past we’ve built pop-pop boats and a pumpkin-hurling trebuchet. This week I built a prototype mousetrap car.  The kids tested and critiqued the design and will have a month to build their own version and race them when we meet again.

I’ll get some video of the race next month.  I was able to get the still shot on the right because my duct tape construction method was failing and so the boom arm was no longer exerting enough force to move the rear wheels.

Back in 2002 I was backing up my computer to CD – this seems like a good use for that stack of old backups.

#18/365