Stories written for MIT Project Manus.

Student Maker in Focus: Gloria Zhu’s IAP Make-a-thon

Student Profile Article: Original Link

MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) is a four-week period in January during which faculty and students are freed from the rigors of regularly scheduled classes for flexible teaching and learning and for independent study and research. Gloria Zhu, a second year undergrad studying Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) made the most of this time by receiving an IAP Mini Grant to develop and engineer a robotic paintbrush, learning to quilt in Jane Halpern’s course (see below) and working on an MIT design installation with Nervous System, a generative design studio that hosted the MAD workshop “Building Complex Curvature From Flat Sheets.” It was one of the more impressive and jam-packed make-a-thons we witnessed this IAP!

The seeds of the idea for her personal project — the robotic paint brush — came from Gloria’s background in art as well as mechanical engineering. “I have a background in painting, so I thought, why not try to combine the two and create a pen plotter that has extra degrees of freedom so that it can create brushstrokes.” This is not to say she hopes a robotic paint brush could one day replace the need for a painter: “I think the touch of a hand and a brushstroke in a painting is irreplaceable. That is the soul of the painting.” Her hope is that her project can be used to add a painterly aesthetic to creating forms that can’t be made as easily with the human hand. As Gloria puts it, “Creating a grid of 1000 squares, that's not really something that a human could do absolutely perfectly. I think that's where the interesting part comes in, when you combine these robotic or computational methods with physical media.”

“I haven't built anything like this before, so this is definitely going to be a big learning experience.”

Last year, Gloria worked with a team over IAP that built Mags, the Chess Playing Robot. She says that experience assisted her in this project, as both used a similar gantry mechanism. First was the CAD work, followed by tests of parts using FDM 3D printers, but she ultimately decided on an SLS nylon powder printer, because it creates stronger and more lightweight pieces. Her project is nearing completion.

“I think the support that the makerspaces on campus here have given me is extremely special and it is what allows me to even think about doing a project like this in the first place… I think having access to a bunch of people through these makerspaces who have experience in fields that I don't really have that much experience in makes it really easy to have an idea and then ask people, 'how do I do this?’, and then just execute it.”

Staff Maker in Focus: Quilting has its Metropolis Moment

Staff Profile Article: Original Link

It all started with a video we produced last year. Over IAP 2023, Lucy Sandoe, a PhD student in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, created a visually stunning quilt to represent the datasets of geophysics, her field of study. Divided into three panels, with each one depicting different aspects of geophysics, Lucy’s story inspired Jane Halpern, the Communications Officer in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, to seek out an opportunity with Project Manus to share her love, experience and passion for quilting with MIT students. In addition, Jane had access to a trove of incredible fabric that she helped deliver as a donation to MIT from the Maher family of Wayland, MA. This is a lifetime-sized donation of fabric to help teach future generations of MIT students about the craft.

“I thought Lucy Sandoe’s quilt, merging geophysics and quilting, was absolutely brilliant, but it also reminded me of some of the quilters that I've met,” Jane says. “Along my way, I found that there's a huge overlap between math minded folks with very active left brains who like graphs and analysis and numbers, and quilters.” What better place than MIT to offer a weeks-long quilting workshop! 

“I learned that anyone at MIT, staff, faculty, student — anyone — can teach an IAP class. And I thought I could teach a quilting class. I could do that! So I started poking around, and I discovered that there was such a thing as Project Manus, that there were makerspaces!”

In Learn To Quilt, hosted in Metropolis between January 8 and February 2, 2024, students were taken through the entire process of making a patchwork quilt: from the design stage of choosing a pattern and a palette of fabrics, through cutting, piecing, basting and quilting, making meaningful choices relating to technique throughout and seeing how those choices affect their overall product (which was a large throw-size quilt, completed on the final day of the workshop).

Combining visual art and tactile handwork, quilting is both an art and a craft, with a rich cultural and historical heritage. Throughout the workshop, students were exposed to many different examples of quilting technique from multiple eras and cultures, and encouraged to continue developing their skill as part of an ongoing practice of slow, mindful handcrafting.

“There's actually quite a really harmonious overlap between people who like to visualize information scientifically and people who like to pull together different colors and fabrics to tell a story. It's a really common blend of characteristics, and I thought MIT really attracts the kinds of students who would take off in this art form and take off with this craft.”

Jane didn’t have to wait long to find out if her hypothesis was correct. The results were incredible. “Our students are brilliant, they are precise, but they are also creative, and they consistently solve for really unexpected values. And you can see that in the individual quilts they made.”

Some of the IAP students have already used their new skill to design unique and personal new quilts. Alexandra Valdepeñas Ramirez, doubling in Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Sciences, used a hand quilting technique called English Paper Piecing to create her second-ever quilt, a wall hanging of the newly discovered Einstein tile known as "the Hat". Valdepeñas made her own templates for the shape, which tessellates to cover a surface with no gaps in a pattern that never repeats. The blend of advanced mathematics and skilled handcrafting is bold, playful — and perfectly MIT.

Quilting and similar handcrafts have been traditionally practiced by women, and when people think about making at MIT, Jane believes, they tend to “think about 3D printers, they think about really high technological things — they think about welding, glass blowing, metalworking — and sometimes they don't think so much about the crafts that have historically been practiced by women.”

She continues, “I think it's really important to acknowledge that hands-on includes everybody, that everyone can participate in artwork and craftwork; that quilting, fabric, textiles are for everybody. And I think that it's really exciting to see people responding positively to something that is a little out of MIT's comfort zone, and that is still so perfect for us.”

Fabrication Focus: Aluminum MIG Welding

Fabrication Focus Article: Original Link

Metropolis Makerspace (6C-006B) is one of the few places on MIT’s campus where students can learn how to weld. As Audrey Y Cui (Computer Science and Brain Cognitive Sciences), one of our student makerspace mentors explains: “I love recommending Metropolis as a place where people can learn how to weld because we have pretty accessible trainings. Afterwards, after people are trained, they can come during open hours to work on their own projects.” This sort of flexibility and openness is rare around MIT’s makerspaces, especially for welding. And even rarer still is Project Manus’ Aluminum MIG welding capabilities.

To bring the relative ease of learning MIG (Metal Inert Gas) welding to aluminum, we recently added a MIG aluminum welding capability (as well as a CNC plasma cutter) to our hotwork space, in addition to our MIG and TIG welders. MIG welding is fairly straightforward to learn, according to Audrey, and is “basically a hot glue gun for metal.” TIG (Tungsten Inert Gas), on the other hand, can be more challenging: “You have a torch in one hand, and then you have to manually feed in the filler wire, so it’s more like soldering. But you are also controlling the heat with the foot pedal and also trying really hard not to contaminate the electrode on the welding torch.”

Welding is just another tool that one can use for fabrication, but it has unique properties. According to Audrey, it is the strongest way to stick two pieces of metal together, and it forms electrically conductive joints. Since aluminum is regularly machined in our sister shop The Deep, having an aluminum MIG welder is especially helpful for some student’s fabrication workflow. Seth Avecilla, a Maker Technical Specialist at MIT Project Manus, explains that there are certain reasons why aluminum is the material of choice for some projects, like machinability or corrosion resistance. “We’ve had some marine stuff go through where [the object] was going to be exposed to salt water” — something which would not be ideal for rustable steel.

Raymond Turrisi, a Manus mentor and a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, explains: in the MIT Marine Autonomy Lab where he is a member, “we have a large 16-foot autonomous surface vehicle that we deploy out on the Charles River and in coastal regions that we use for research and education.” This 10 year old vessel, originally acquired for the RobotX competition, recently started to show signs of decay on the structure that supports the inflatable pontoons and motor. Raymond continues: “when we were discussing how we were going to go about fixing this, I offered [aluminum welding] to my group, because I was the only one in our group aware of the especially unique equipment on campus, and I had the overall experience and training with welding in general.”

Raymond was able to use his skills in the hotwork space to re-weld the frame with the new aluminum welder, as well as use the pneumatic tools like the grinders and Dremels to grind away the old welds and then weld over them to repair them. “There’s a ton of research opportunities in the marine industry”, Raymond says, “Everything which we put into the field and intend on getting back, must be made corrosion resistant. Aluminum is pretty corrosion resistant, easy to work with, and reasonably durable for our applications, so it is very common for marine applications''.

The specialty aluminum MIG welding tool is valuable to our students and staff because, as Audrey puts it, welding aluminum in general is quite difficult: “Aluminum has a really high capacity for heat. So when you heat it up, it heats up very quickly.” Raymond explains that a challenge when welding aluminum is that since heat quickly spreads and the melting point is close to half that of steel, you are much more likely to blow a hole through the piece. One of the special features of the aluminum MIG welders is something called a pulse mode which, in addition to controlling the arc, helps manage the heat by alternating current at a high frequency to reduce the heat that is dumped into the system..

Recently, Audrey has used the aluminum MIG welder to fabricate a 100 pound grill stand with 80/20 aluminum, a T-slot construction system you can use to build virtually anything. Audrey’s friends had a grill, but not the stand. “People would sit down on the ground cross-legged while grilling,” which wasn’t ideal according to Audrey. “So I took some scrap pieces of 80/20, welded them together and it was a fun opportunity to get a bit of welding practice in.” This aluminum base, much lighter than steel, lets her friends grill the “ideal way… while standing!”

The demand for welding on campus is high. Students come in to learn how to weld for their MechE, AeroAstro, and Architecture classes, as well as for the How to Make Everything course run out of the MIT Media Lab. There has also historically been a welding prerequisite for the popular IAP bicycle building course. “There are a good number of people who are just like, ‘welding looks really cool, and I just wanna learn a new skill,’ and that was kind of me when I first got into it”, recounts Audrey.

“I think it's just a really empowering skill to have — you've got a bunch of sparks flying everywhere! You're sticking metal together. It's a lot of fun”

As to her role as a mentor with Project Manus, Audrey believes that beyond welding, being a peer mentor has built her confidence as a maker, and she wants to continue to give back to the makerspace that has taught her so many skills. “The great thing about this makerspace is I can still continue to be a student in many other ways —  I still have a lot to learn in terms of welding and all the other equipment around the shops.”