I’ve been really fascinated lately by magnetic and electric fields and how they interact (mostly influenced by my interest in magnetohydrodynamics). One relatively simple but fun project is an air ionizer. The one I’ve built converts mains voltages (~120VAC @ 60Hz in the US) to something on the order of a few kilovolts at a …
Magnetohydrodynamics: possibly the most intimidating name for a relatively simple concept ever! If you’ve ever seen The Hunt for Red October and the quest for the “silent submarine”, you may have heard of MHD. Basically, MHD involves taking the cross product of a magnetic field with an electric field to produce the resultant vector, the …
You might be familiar with the Vex Robotics competition. This year I thought it would be great to create an iPad app to aid in the somewhat complicated scoring process. In the spirit of the competition, I thought making it open source would be appropriate. This app was a lot of fun to make! Currently, …
For this year’s science olympiad competition I built a really cool robotic arm with my friend Ben Katz. I’ve already posted about the controller for this arm, but the whole thing is pretty awesome. The arm has 6 points of dexterity- base rotation, the lower arm, the mid arm, the upper arm, wrist rotation, and …