Charles Guan has an “undying desire to create that which should not be created”, like his treaded skateboard (called LandBearShark). For the last two years, he has been sharing his fabrication knowledge with MIT engineering students as an instructor in a disruptive course that he created, which requires that they build and race a custom electric vehicle.
“The distinctions between software and hardware are disappearing.”
“Your Projects” is a column that features some of the awesome creations our readers have been making. These projects from our readers come from the MAKE Google+ Community and beyond.
MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits recently revealed some of his fascinating work in the field of self-assembling structures, coined “4D Printing”. The four dimensions in question here aren’t all spacial — the “4D” aspect utilizes three spacial dimensions, in the form of 3D Printing, and an additional time dimension. The parts printed in this way are then submerged in water to facilitate self-assembly.
It’s remarkable how the MIT Hobby Shop presages aspects of the hackerspace movement… In the 1937-38 academic year, Vannevar Bush, then Vice President of MIT, granted a group of 16 MIT students permission to use a room in the basement of building 2. With equipment they found around the Institute they set up a wood […]
Charles Guan is an MIT alumnus, and has been making projects that have been festive and amazing over the past few years. Charles has been influential in the MIT Makerspace/club MITERS, where students create all manner of great projects. He and MITERS members have been frequent fliers at various Maker Faires, so you may already be familiar with his work.
Charles has served as a Teaching Assistant at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, helping his fellow students to fabricate the contraptions of their dreams. As a TA, he’s heard the same questions over and over, so he created some instructional documentation to make his and his fellow students’ lives easier. This was a set of lectures and handouts he called How to Build Your Robot Really Really Fast (HTBYRRRF). In more recent times, he set out to update this as a more inclusive set of building guides. Drawing from his own online documentation, he was able to codify his ideas into a thorough Instructable: How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast, or HTBYERRF.
This modular robot made up of <1cm components, can fit together with its cousins to form more complicated structures, building on a concept where proteins could one day do the same thing to form minuscule machines.
