Projects

Chutes & Ladders the name of my tall bike. It was built over the course of 8 months from summer 2011 to spring 2012. When I first built it I wrote this about it. “This ship will never be done, but while its in progress it sure will go places.” 10 years later and that’s still true. Regular maintenance over those years has included cutting it in half and replacing the top frame when it started to buckle. Numerous iterations of the electronics package. Several rebuilds of the rear wheel. A set of custom CNC machined triple clamps. It has been a heck of a ride. View up to date logs of its missions with SCUL here.

Fab Academy is a course from the Fab Foundation which spun out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. This class is a survey of digital fabrication and design. The course is taught in a distributed model where each student signs up with a node or Fab Lab local to them. Each week for 20 weeks a new topic is introduced in a global online lecture and then students meet their local instructors for hands on practice in their lab. The first subject in the course is website development. Each student has 1 week to customize a portfolio they will use for the rest of the class and each subsequent week they must document their work on their site.

Quickbox is a solution to a problem I encountered while teaching parkour in school. In the when there is no playground or outdoor area available for class we would bring in equipment and set up in the school gym, cafeteria, or wherever there was space. At the end of each class we would have to pack up this equipment and but it in some corner, closet, or storage space. Extra storage space is rare at schools and sometimes parkour equipment can be large. We are trying to replicate walls, railings, and the outdoor environment. We use wooden boxes which have a footprint of ~2ftx4ft and are 2-4ft tall. These take up a lot of space and schools rarely have enough space for one never mind multiple of these boxes. I designed and prototyped a box that is cut on a CNC router from plywood and can be assembled for use and disassembled storage or transportation. It is strong enough to jump and climb on and light enough that i can be moved by one person. The initial prototype was developed during my Fab Academy course. See the details here.

In 2016 I heard about a new event called the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race. It was a challenge to build an all-terrain, human powered, amphibious vehicle which was also a piece of art. I roped in my friend Carl and said that we already know how to build weird bicycles having built many for SCUL, Boston’s friendly neighborhood bicycle chopper gang. I said that we should challenge ourselves by building something that either doesn’t have pedals or doesn’t have wheels.

Mini Scaf is another solution to a parkour problem. We use “Scaffolding” Scaf for short to make pop up play structures to train and run classes on. These structures are made from steel pipe and connectors most commonly Kee Klamps. We can design and build fairly simple structures for small classes or events easily with a paper sketch. For bigger installations or events we want to build more complex structures. I have experimented with different design systems to use CAD to create the drawings and plans for these structures but nothing has been quite right for one reason or another. When I started to learn more about 3d printing I thought that I could design a set of miniature versions of these connectors and make small models of the scaf sets. I could then either bring the physical model or photograph and annotate it to become a build plan.

I had a student who I was teaching basic electronics who presented me with an interesting problem. She had a family tradition that every year at Thanksgiving there would be a jar of acorns and the family would play all submit guesses as to how many acorns were in the jar. It had always been the role of the family patriarch to count the acorns and determine the winner. The patriarch had gotten older and had some health issues that meant he could no longer be the counter of the acorns. However no one else in the family really wanted the job. So her solution was to ask me to build a robot that could not only count the acorns but make it look a whimsical while it did the job. After some discussion we had both settled on marble machines as inspiration which would ultimately lead to several a problem since acorns are not nearly as uniform as marbles.

For Halloween 2023 I was inspired by Bob at I Like to Make Stuff who took a papercraft template for a cardboard Optimus Prime Helmet and modified it for laser cutting instead of hand cutting and enlarged it so that it would be the size of Optimus Prime’s head if he was 22ft tall. This resulted in the wearer looking like a human bobble head or a funcopop toy. Hence FuncopOptimus Prime.