| Web Resources |
| These sites are excellent resources to research technical material, get inspiration for your robot, and find out how things work!!! |
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If you have never used Google, you probably grew up in a cave. It is the best search engine ever!!! |
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How Stuff Works lives up to its name. It is the best resource for finding out how different technical things work. This website will serve as the class text. |
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Good place to look up analysis that has to do with engineering. Forget what stress is? efunda can tell you all about it |
WIKIPEDIA
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Wikipedia is great for learning a small amount about anything. Want to know when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb? This is the place to go. |
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Matweb is a great place to find material properties. They have information on just about any material you can imagine. |
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This is a good place to look up mathematical concepts. You can quickly find things like common integrals or trig identities. |
2.007 Website |
This is the website for the MIT mechanical engineering department’s introduction to mechanical design class. The lecture notes have are the best compilation of design principles I have ever seen. Students build robots for a class project (where do you think I got the idea for our class!). You can find some really ingenious technical solutions in some of the robots. |
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This is the website for MIT's graduate product design class in mechanical engineering. It has many great links to other sites, and tells about the basics of product design. |
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Google Scholar is an easy way to get academic articles for free. It works just like regular google. |
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At the US Patent Office, you can search for any patent issued from the 1700's till now. Looking through all patents generates good ideas, and prevents you from reinventing the wheel. If you are thinking of designing a protective carrying case for your banana, sorry, it already exists (US Pat# 6,918,231) |
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If you find a patent that looks sounds interesting, like a banana carrying case, Free Patent Fetcher is a really easy way to download it in pdf form. |
