Over the past three years, I've been part of several projects as a mentor, not as a student.
So, even though I did not work on these in the building part, I still gave a lot of advice and helped the students with it.
This is a list of some of them:
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**MIT Edgerton Center EDW 2024**
# Furrari
The Furrari group built a car that was controlled by a Cat! I was one of the main mentors for this team, toghether with Christy, and so i spent most of my time with them!
The car is controlled by an ESP32 which talks via wifi with another ESP32, which was either the controller or a harness that the cat was wearing which had an IMU and reported the angle the cat was facing to the first ESP (the one on the Car itself).
With both the angle the cat was facing and the car's angle, the car would steer towards whatever the cat "wanted".
The body of the car was made using foam and scuplting it with a hot wire until it resembled a Ferrari, so it was hand-made !
# Katawawa
This project consisted of a basket ball launcher situated underneeth the hoop that aimed at you when returning the ball ! It was built by two students, one from Spain and another from Mexico and the final result was very powerful, with motors spinning at thousands of RPM.
# Waforte
Waforte was a musical fountain that changed the colors of the fountain's LEDs depending on what music was playing at the time. It also had control over the water pumps and so how much water was pushed out also depended on the music.
Their project consisted of two parts, one which had three plates with LEDs at the bottom and which changed color with the loudness of the music, together with the flow of water at the main nozzle at the top.
The other part, had several nozzles in a line that had an LED inside of each, where each LED represented a frequency, so the resulting effect was like a spectrogram.
# MACA
MACA, Short for Macarena, was a dancing robot that would teach you how to dance. It was built using Microbit and had several dances coded in. The main challenge of this robot was the crazy ammount of degrees of freedom and servos it required, as not only could it move its arms, but also its hips and legs, creating lots of problems as sometimes it would hit another limb by mistake.
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**2024 CIC TechProjects**
# Sensorial Cabin Inside Out
This project consisted on the building of a large cabin that could create certain emotions upon entering inside.
The students' description of it is: "The product will consist of stimuli for the senses of touch, hearing, sight, and smell, which will change according to the character from the movie."
This idea comes from the film Inside Out, where each character is based on a different emotion and from that this project wants people to be able to feel these emotions.
# Laser Harp
The Laser Harp is a musical instrument built with lasers and photoresistors, so when someone crosses the laser, a sound is produced as if it were a Harp.
The main goal of this project was not only to build this cool instrument, but also have 32 lasers, which is around double what people had done before. This created some very hard challenges to overcome, but this team pushed through and were able to build an awesome harp.
# Camera Car
The goal of this project was to build a car that could be controlled remotely and which had a camera that could be viewed and moved with a VR set.
This was a very challenging project and so required lots of digging and coding.
# Anti-Robbery System
This project aimed to build an Anti-Robbery System for a cage, where by approaching it, it would flood with water coming from two bottles. This project's main challenge was waterproofing and making sure water would not leak into the electronics, but the team prototyped several ideas and finally decided to use bottles as storage and the cap as a trigger.
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**2024 MIT&CIC Hacakthon**
# Musical Glove
The aim of this project was to build a glove which could play music. They built a glove with buttons at the fingertips where each played a specific note.
# Scalextric
The name os this project is quite self-explanatory, they wanted to build a race track where cars would be powered by the track itself.
# Arcade Game
In this project, students wanted to build an Arcade Game where you want to click when the middle LED was illuminated.
# Wind Tunnel
Together with a fog machine, this team created a working wind tunnel.
# ROV
The aim of this project was to build a remote operated vehicle that could sense if it has a wall in front and stop.
# Accustic Levitator
This project consisted on building a chamber where some foam could levitate because of some ultrasonic waves being generated below.
# ATV
This project was about building a vehicle that could be operated remotely and could move both on water and on ground.
# Ball Thrower
This project was about building an automatic ball thrower.
# 2023 MIT&CIC Hacakthon Light Saber
During the 2023 Hackathon, I heard about a group of high schoolers who wanted to build a light saber, so I went to check out what they where up to
and I immediately wanted to help these students as they shared great passion for this idea. This team was formed by people from different ages and schools,
so they didn't know each other at the beginning.
I started talking to them about what their ideas were and soon I realized they had no experience with Arduinos, nor soldering, nor sawing. Anything.
So I took it upon myself to teach them these skills and mentor them on how they would like to build it.
After two intense days of soldering, coding and 3D Printing they where able to build a working prototype of a light saber.
It had an animation when it was turned on and off and used an opaque cylinder to cover the LEDs inside.
After the hackathon, this was one of its major projects and it has been mentioned in several interviews to the organizers (Alicia Lopez at educa.barcelona and Edward Moriarty at MIT Technology Review)
# 2023 CIC TechProjects
As part of the 2023 Hackathon, we where invited to mentor the students at the high school CIC Baxtillerats, where we helped solving problems of several projects and bring some new ideas into them.
These are the highlights of some of these projects:
# LED Ball
They where planning on building a ball with touch sensors, an Accelerometer and Gyroscope, and LED Strips.
They wanted to change the colors depending on the velocity and if someone's touching it, it shouldn't light up. With the possibility of adding some delay between the throwing and receiving of the ball.
Some issues we addressed with them where:
- How to power such a small device wirelessly.
- To what we found the solution of using a powerbank to give nominal 5V power to the arduino nano.
- How to fit those touch sensors and use them.
- We found some other sensors that might do a better job or placing five of them in the best way possible.
## Vinyl / Record Player
This project consisted in repairing and rebuilding an old broken Record player and they wanted to tune it to be able to change speed.
During the time we spent with them we talked about:
- Trying to reverse engineer the amplifier board that they got with the record player
- To what we encountered that either there was something broke in the PCB or we were lacking some other piece to plug the connector into.
- We opened to the idea of finding a way to play the records without electronical components, so using a mechanical way (like the paper speaker they built.
- Now they are considering moving into the mechanical way, but it has to be talked between the whole group, as during today two people where missing.
- The needle that they are using is damaging the records, so Ed suggested to buy some Record player's needles from a company.
## Electric Scooter
Another group was working on building an electric scooter from scratch. They already had scooter built out of wood and now they wanted to add the electrical part.
I did not get the opportunity to mentor this group that much, but I gave them advice on the building.
