I am faculty in our SPIN (Surgical Program in Innovation) which is a course designed to get surgical residents thinking about designing, making and selling medical devices. The course starts with idea generation, then a hackathon, then business plan generation, then I teach CAD, making (3D printing, etc) and electronics and now we are coming to the end of the course this weekend, and I am one of the faculty judges. There are 3 others (VCs and faculty from the Harvard Business School/Sloane School at MIT) but I am the judge for the prototype/design part. Figured I needed a desk sign to embody multimaterial making and thinking quickly,
It’s powered by an Adafruit Feather M0 (ARM M0 processor) with an OLED screen (yeah overkill, it was already on my desk, just took off the servo board).
Whipped it all up in OnShape, cut the gears out of Cherry and Translucent Red Acrylic from Inventables and the main part is maple.
Is it silly, of course. But is it nerdy? You bet! Perfect. And I even left space through the sides to charge the battery via USB into the feather! And the waste triangles are being turned into Wine bottle tags… The gear are riding on some left over actobotics screws with washers as “bearings”. Spin super freely on their own. Glued the legs in with Tightbond III
Because I was bored (and invested 3 minutes in coding this in the office, while I was waiting for my code to compile). I wanted to see what scrollRight did in the VFX library to be honest… Might change it back (this whole thing is a few lines of code after all)
Nice! Just curious @henryhbk , in your SPIN program, do you use/teach a specific innovation technique or process to come up with new ideas? I ask as it is a interest are of mine (I wrote a book on the topic using food as a model to teach innovation), but also because I am a believer that if you have a good process, you can come up with great ideas and then bring them to life.
You mean do we teach around specific example/topics? Yes, this is specifically around medical device problem solving. For CAD examples we do some medical and some non-medical parts (i.e. make a wrench from a mechanical drawing).
That made me smile. Just think how many things have been accomplished in recent modern history while “waiting for my code to compile” ! I write a lot of haiku during that time. Someday, these modern kids won’t have much compile-time to wait through, and all that little in-between-time innovation will be lost.
I guess, but even with 16 threads on a dual quad-core Xeon with bus based flash drives, 2m lines of source take a while to compile and link into 10 separate applications.
Cherry and Translucent Red Acrylic from Inventables and the main part is 
