I’m a senior at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science, and interested in using technology and building products in sports, music, medical devices, self driving cars, and many other industries to make the world a better, more exciting and more efficent place. I’m a rower here and I’m interested specifically in efficiency and optimization of technique as well as injury prevention and physical therapy technology. I’m also an adrenaline junkie and I crave all sorts of adventures from climbing half dome to cliff jumping to using technology to do things no one has ever done before.

This week we modeled a final project. One potential idea I have is a tennis serve pole. The idea is a stationary tennis ball hangs from a string fed through a PVC pipe and the player can stand underneath and practice her serve hundreds of times over without having to go pick up tennis balls every 15 minutes. There are sensors on the ball and the racket that take metrics on speed, spin, and motion to help the player optimize her serve technique.

The first step of this project was characterizing the laser cutter. My lab partners and I discovered the following metrics for a PLS6.75 laser cutter: We found a focal length of 2.0” when we placed the chuck key under the laser and adjusted it until the chuck key started to tilt back slightly. We found that ±0.2004 from the 2.0” focal length also worked well. We discovered the laser cutter kerf was around 0.

This week, we characterized the design rules for our PCB production process: Step 0: Test and characterize the Mill We used the Roland mill to cut this test piece using the 1⁄64 inch mill bit. We were able to get really small traces but we couldn’t go infinitely small- the smallest, accurate trace we could make was around .010 inches. We are also limited by the width of the bit (.

When brainstorming ideas for what to cut something additive on the 3D printer, I was stuck on what additive really meant. A TA explained that it was like the zipper on my laptop case- something that’s not impossible, but really hard to cut using subtractive cutting machines like a mill without breaking the pieces afterwards and putting them back together. I then realized that additive really means interconnected pieces that make a larger system- then I thought of the idea of chain mail, so a chain of rings.

This week we milled a “hello world” board using an attiny44 microcontroller. The first step was drawing a schematic and routing the board in eagle. Here’s the original board we used to re-draw: I wanted to add a potentiometer to the board as a part of my final project, so I found the footprint for a pot: The problem is the potentiometer we had in the shop available has pins on it and the footprint in the previous board diagram is surface mount.