kate hollenbach

Made using the Modela in the Media Lab machine shop, and of course a soldering iron:

They don’t do too much other than transmit "hello world" over a serial connection. Today I’ll be writing a little code to get the larger board to blink an LED and respond to button presses, exciting I know. We’re using an ATTiny45 processor which has a different instruction set than the chip we used in the microcontroller lab I took last year, but hopefully it won’t be too different.

One of the classes I’m taking this term is MAS.863, "How to Make (almost) Anything," where I’m learning how to use a lot of the fabrication machinery at the Media Lab. There’s a website for the class where all the students are keeping a record of their work (myself included), but I also want to write about my projects here. About every week or so we’re taught how to use a new tool, and then assigned to make something with it. A couple weeks ago the "tool" was the laser cutter and the "assignment" was a 3D Construction Kit.

My construction kit had 4 parts, seen below:

I used the laser cutter to make a bunch of these parts out of corrugated cardboard. The pieces "press fit" together, meaning they can be assembled using the slots cut into the pieces, without any adhesive (if you’re interested in the science of how this works, there is a paper you can read). I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to build with my curvy shapes, but I was pretty happy with the results. Here are some pictures of things I built: