About Me

Hello and thank you for checking out my website! My name is Ryan Hoffman and I am a sophomore here at MIT studying mechanical engineering. I'm super excited to be taking this class. I first heard about it on my official visit in my senior year of highschool when I went to the class. I was there for the 3D printing lecture and was abosultley fascinated and have wanted to take it ever since.

I have loved making things for as long as I can remember. In highschool I spent some time desinging and building a few iterations of robotic arms. The first versions were made of foam core and I eventually graduated to using the laser cutter and designed the whole thing in CAD. Additionaly, I have always been super interested in 3D printing, finding the technology, specifically FDM fascinating. Recently I have been interested in adding additional degrees of freedom to a traditional printer to hopefully achieve non-planar printing. More specifically, I am intersted in how non-planar printing could be used to imporve the structural integrity of parts. I think a good analog to the problem is to think about the grains in wood.

Last spring, I started doing research out of Sea Grant, working on the development of a robotic zipline for water sampling. Over the summer, I started a full mechanical redesign of the system with the focus of improving the drive train, reliability, and weight reduction. The robot works by climbing between one anchorage point that is on a sea wall or simply above water while the other is on the floor at the bottom of the coastal water.