At the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering
The lab has a new grant from the Kentucky Science and Engineering Foundation: “Combining Soft Materials with Mechanical Parts for Robotic and Human Health Applications.” We will install functional fibers in laser-cut and 3D printed parts using a modified sewing machine. Above: video of the current machine installing high strength Kevlar fiber in a plastic …
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Our lab has a new paper out in collaboration with the Berfield group about a windowpane-shaped microstructure that has two stable shapes. Tom Lucas (who graduated with a Ph.D. from our group in 2014) and Jaz pointed a heat gun at the MEMS devices one day, trying to flatten them by thermal expansion. This led to …
Whether it’s superstrings in physics or the first violin in a symphony orchestra, strings run the universe. Invisible strings control everything from creepy marionettes to the direction of the global economy. Without them, we would lack conduits for mechanical forces and fodder for cheesy metaphors. Strings. They form the fabric of human society and the …
April 25 was demo day in the ECE 412 (Embedded Systems) course I taught this semester, and we had the biggest batch ever. 17 teams presented projects ranging from musical instruments to games to wheeled robots. Clockwise from top left: Skittles sorter, guitar auto-strummer, disturbing metal creature probably found in the depths of LVL1, and …
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We have been dealing with bistable structures across different size scales. A common question is, how can we detect their state electronically. This project uses machine-sewable conductive thread to add an electronic switch to bendable compliant beams in a cm-scale structure. The beam material is 0.125 mm thick plastic film: thick enough to have some “snap” (video …
