Blog

A few months ago, Jordan and I decided to build a chalk drawing robot. Our plan was to enter the Amazement Square 2016 Chalk Festival, draw an exact replica of the Mona Lisa, and walk away with the gold. We built Chalkbot over the course of three nights. Jordan focused on the electronics, wiring the stepper motors and programming the Arduino with a gcode interpreter, while I built the gantry and other mechanical aspects.

Meet Trey, Terrell, and Christian (from left to right) of Team Turbo. They had last pick of the four nitro cars, which came with a few challenges. It was clear at the start that the front wheel assembly was completely broken and most of the screws stripped. It wasn't until the teardown began that they got a better feel for how much work needed to be done. It turns out that screw extraction is an art that we've yet to master.

This fall we have two high powered and high energy projects going on at Vector Space. As is tradition, we're building and launching something into the air. And- new this time around- we are [hopefully] keeping our Nitro RC Cars on the ground.

Our goal was to take a picture of the Earth. We thought about simply enjoying existing images easily found online, but similar to the satisfaction gained from changing your own brake pads, we decided it would be more enjoyable to take the pictures ourselves. So with three engineers at the lead, we recruited two teams of high schoolers for our very own mini-space race.