This semester’s lab-affiliated Capstone team is busy testing the wireless wearable accelerometers they’ve built. Our Capstone course is a semester of senior year and it’s usually the last project students do for course credit. The big picture for Team 9 is a system to measure training intensity, with some great guidance from the Athletics department. …
Category Archives: Lab News
Fabric linear motor
We continue experimenting with patterning different types of fibers. When fine insulated wire is embroidered onto a piece of linen tape and supplied with a current, it interacts with magnets. Two sets of embroidered coils, one on top and one on the underside of the tape in this video, pull the tape to the left …
Tumbling tumbleweed
In an effort to create tiny holes in our molded rubber parts, we made these small salt crystals by adding concentrated saltwater to alcohol, which is a poor solvent for salt. Right away, it starts to snow 25-micron cubes. The cubes are added to liquid rubber, then dissolved out in water, creating voids–an approach that …
Fall 17 class roundup
The latest batch of ECE 412 (Embedded Systems) projects is now online. Check out the LED sign that now adorns our lab, the duct-tape based CyberHand and the sound-controlled ping pong tubes. The 14 projects also included a sorting hat, plus a different kind of sorting system based on a pressure sensor. While cardboard and …
Athletic tape that tracks your moves
Check out wireless optical stretch sensors in action in this video. We embedded a strain-sensitive elastic optical fiber into a piece of sticky, stretchy athletic tape that can track muscle stretching in real time. There is a single “U-turn” shaped fiber along with a detachable wireless module that can also collect acceleration and orientation data. …