December 29, 2014

2014 East Campus Roller Coaster


Since working on the rotating climbing wall last year, I've been interested in trying to revive the East Campus roller coaster.  Fellow MechE 2016's Jaguar K. and Wesley L. were similarly enthusiastic about the roller coaster, so we started coming up with ideas over that fall semester.  We got an early start on the approval process for the ride, and, thanks to lots of hard work from our Rush chairs and others, we were able to get the permitting and approval from MIT and Cambridge in time.

After a week of construction, we had a working roller coaster:

Photo credit to the folks at monograph.io

More documentation of the roller coaster's design and construction can be found here.

September 30, 2014

iPad Retina Display External Monitor

Two summers ago I bought an iPad 3 LCD off ebay.  These are 9.7" 2048 x 1536 IPS panels, which use an internal DisplayPort interface.  In May, I finally got around to building an external display out of the panel, which can be clipped directly onto the side of my Macbook Pro's screen, and is powered by a USB port.

I have been using the display on a daily basis for the last four months, and it has held up beautifully.  It took a little while for my eyes to get used to the tiny 264 pixels-per-inch pixel density, but I can now comfortably use it at native resolution.



The display's build log can be found here.