MakeMIT 2021
My friend and fellow Caltech student Brit Wylie and I teamed up for MakeMIT 2021, a virtually-held hackathon during the height of lockdown. As a mechanical engineer, I love the concept of MakeMIT as a hardware hackathon: it is an event that fosters physically prototyping your team's innovations, not just coding. Usually in person, it was modified to a 2-week virtual event in two stages:
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DESIGN STAGE, 24 hours: admitted applications formed teams and began designing, CADing, and coding their projects, with a preliminary pitch to judges at the end of the 24-hour period.
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BUILD STAGE, two weeks: selected teams (of which we were one!) received up to $500 of parts and tools to build and test the design.
Our Project: Chalk it Up!
The video below showcases our project. We built a chalk-art drawing robot with two axes of motion for drawing images on a sidewalk surface, a third vertical axis to push down the chalk, and a chalk-switching mechanism to accommodate multiple colors in a drawing. The concept was inspired by seeing chalk art around the neighborhood being used to foster a sense of togetherness during a period of isolation and social distancing.