In my freshman year, I was talking to my friend and mentor, Aaron Ramirez and he said that he wanted to start a club in Next House for people to just get together and make stuff. I thought this was a great idea and I wanted to get this group off the ground. So I pitched the idea to my friends in Next House who I thought would be interested. I made an e-mail list and soon after we had our first meeting.
The first meeting had a lot (~40) people in attendance. Aaron put together an organized agenda and I was surprised by how organized and legitimate the meeting was run. We talked about the general idea of Next Make and a bunch of logistic stuff. In fact, we talked about way too much logistic stuff. We mostly talked about where we were going to get funding. We would try to talk about ideas for something we could build, but the conversation would always drift back to the issue of money. We asked for someone to be the treasurer, who in this case would be in charge of the money that we have, but mostly they would be in charge of getting money. We had a couple of volunteers for that; in the long run though, no one stuck around and found legitimate, reliable sources of money.
Then Aaron came up with the idea that we should collaborate on one big group project, namely, the RepRap. The RepRap is basically a bare-bones 3D printer. It’s also the closest thing you can get to a self-replicating machine because the parts on this 3D printer were made by a 3D printer. It was a good idea for collaboration because it encompassed Mechanical Engineering (making the structure of the 3D printer), Electrical Engineering (making the circuits and electronics), and Computer Science (dealing with the software and firmware to make the RepRap work). Accordingly, we had a meeting to break up into sub-teams to get this project done. However, when we had the meeting for the RepRap, there were significantly fewer members than that were at the original meeting. There were about 15-20 people, which is about half of the number of people that were at the original meeting. Anyway, we broke up into sub-teams and set out to have this 3D printer done by MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend (CPW). The reason we wanted to have it done by CPW is because we wanted to attract more people who enjoyed to build stuff to Next House. People who enjoy building things typically live in East Campus, Senior Haus, or Burton Conner. Furthermore, we wanted to make Next House memorable for something other than Next Act and being really far away from main campus.
We began making the parts during Spring Break. Aaron happened to be working in a lab where there was a 3D printer and he used it to make parts for the RepRap. I went home for Spring Break and when I came back there was a 3D printer in the lounge. I thought it was almost done. Little did I know that there was actually a lot of work left to do. The electronics group ended up taking a lot of time. Comparatively, the mechanical group ordered most of the parts, so we just assembled everything. However, the electronics group actually had to make all of the circuits from scratch. Then, the computer science group couldn’t do anything because they can’t debug code without hardware.
Everything was put together just in time for CPW, but there was one problem: IT DIDN’T WORK. We plugged everything in correctly, we had all of the parts made to specifications, we used the open source code as instructed, BUT IT DIDN’T WORK. We tried as hard as we could to have everything working by CPW. We stayed up late, we tightened bolts, checked circuit continuity, and Aaron debugged code (since he was the only one who knew how all of the different groups fit together. The prefrosh came to Next House and we told them to come back tomorrow. We were sure that whatever didn’t work was some minor issue that would quickly be resolved and we will fix it by tomorrow. We promise. But when tomorrow became today, IT STILL DIDN’T WORK. Then we told them to come back the next day, and it still didn’t work.
CPW ended, and we seemed to have failed. We set out to have a working 3D printer by CPW, and we didn’t. We wanted to get people to come to Next House by showing how cool we were, but we didn’t do a good job of that either. Understandably, several people left Next Make never to return because they viewed it as a failed project. “Oh well,” said most, “It was fun while it lasted.”
However, Aaron never gave up. He couldn’t let his dream die. He knew that he could make this 3D printer work. There were several people from all across the world who were able to get it working. And we’re MIT Engineers, we have to be able to make it work! So Aaron worked and worked, every Saturday night in an effort to breathe life into this project. He discovered a few things:
We spent most of our time debugging the hand-made circuits because we thought that is where we would most likely find an error. As it turns out, the circuits we made were fine! We just had a stepper motor that had its actual wire color scheme not match its given wire color scheme! Furthermore, Aaron’s friend was coincidentally also working on a 3D printer, but the friend had given up on the project since he was graduating early, so he donated his electronics (and other mechanical parts) to Aaron. There were several mechanical issues. The plastic parts that Aaron made with a 3D printer started to creep. They were placed near the window and the parts were creeping due to the heat from the sun. They were also creeping due to the odd loading conditions because the frame wasn’t square and a lot of the loads weren’t balanced. There were also problems with the Computer Science aspect of the 3D printer. All of the software was open source, so it was hard to debug.
Aaron and some friends (including myself) worked tirelessly to get it working by the next CPW. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Aaron sent out an e-mail two days before CPW saying that IT WORKS!!! He got it to make a gear. That was the only thing he made, but the fact that he made it was pretty awesome.
The prefrosh at CPW were pretty impressed. They came in droves to watch the 3D printer work. Aaron and some friends and I explained how it worked. Some people just stopped by to see that it worked and they left to go get free food somewhere, some people stuck around and talked for a while. Overall I’d say it was a great experience.
Then CPW was over. Our mission to make a 3D printer was finally accomplished, but by this time we (the few of us left) forgot what Next Make was all about. We were originally about getting people together to make cool projects, and teach other people how to make cool stuff. We invested so much time in the RepRap that we lost focus of Next Make.
Meanwhile, Steve Levine and Joe Colosimo were talking about designing some circuits and they decided to get Next Make up and running again. They started to talk to Scott Bezek as well who has done several cool projects, including a Sleek Word Clock. The three of them started talking to me about starting Next Make up again.
We met up and decided to have a meeting at the beginning of the year for interested freshmen and other Nexties. But I decided to have pre-meeting meeting among the “Exec Board” (Steve, Joe, Scott, Aaron, and myself) to make sure we have all our ducks in a row to make sure Next Make doesn’t flop again. We discussed what went wrong from the first meeting. We said that we focused way too much on logistics and not enough on making stuff. We decided that the logistics should not be the worry of all the Next Make members, just the Exec Board. Also, we thought having an Exec Board was a pretty good idea. We could spread out the responsibilities and group together to accomplish tasks effectively. We also decided to have build parties and seminars as well as a large project.
We took all of these ideas to our first meeting for the year. There were about 15 people in attendance, but about 25 people showed interest. We (the Exec Board) talked about what we have planned for the year, including build parties, seminars, and the large project which was getting party lights for a Next House Party! Then we talked about various projects that we’ve worked on and stuff that we have built. Then we broke up into groups (MechE, EE, etc.) to discuss ideas for the party. Overall, I’d say it was a pretty successful meeting.
Then the next week we had our first build party. We kicked off the year by having a soldering seminar. We had taught people how to solder by having people solder LEDs to a wire and a resistor and have all of the wires soldered together to make a something akin to Christmas lights. There were several people in attendance (~25). We also had a seminar about how to use an Arduino.
Meanwhile, we were working on applying for ASA certification so that we could be recognized as a legitimate MIT Student Club. We put the ASA Application on a Google Doc, then five of us (the Exec Board minus Aaron plus a cool guy named Feng Wu who has helped other clubs get started) met up and made changes to the Document in real time. We got it done relatively fast, and besides, no one of us would have bothered to fill out that application on our own. We sent it in and we got requested to do the next step, an interview. We had the interview with ASA and the more they questions they asked, the less we wanted ASA certification. They wanted us to change our name, be open to all of MIT students, including grad students (which we kind of are, but not explicitly), we couldn’t get funding from Next Exec, they didn’t want us to keep our stuff in Next House, they didn’t want us to be based in Next House, the list goes on and on. There were way too many things that we weren’t willing to compromise about for us to want to continue the certification process. Besides, the only reason we wanted ASA certification in the first place was so that we could get funding, but even the ASA interviewers didn’t seem to recognize whether having ASA certification would help with getting funding, so there wasn’t really a point in continuing.
Anyway, for the next build party I held a laser cutter seminar. The attendance wasn’t as great as it could have been, which is partly my fault, and partly not my fault. I moved the seminar from a Saturday night at 8 to a Friday night at 9 so that more people, such as Steve Levine, could be there. There were two problems: There was SK Late Night (some silly fraternity/sorority thingy with a bunch of freshmen dancing around in their underwear) that night, and a bunch of freshmen went to that instead. When I changed the time of the seminar, I replied to the original e-mail I sent, but instead of reply-all, I just replied to myself, so no one in Next Make actually got the e-mail, they just heard about it by word of mouth. We got to the laser cutter and I gave a lecture on safety with the laser cutter (what not to cut, why you shouldn’t walk away while it’s cutting, what to do if there’s a fire, how to use the ventilators, etc.) Then we made some cool stuff. The original plan was to make a jigsaw puzzle: we would engrave a picture, then we would vector cut the the “jigsaw” part out. What we actually did was make a silhouette of a guy riding a bike out of Acrylic, then we decided to engrave our constitution onto masonite! That took about half an hour and by that time (11:30pm or so), we were pretty tired and decided to go home.
Then we had a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) seminar. Because of the fumes involved, Joe wanted to do it outside, to they scheduled it for earlier in the day. I was at a Robocup meeting, so I didn’t actually go, but from what I heard, it wasn’t that great. They didn’t know what they were doing, so figuring stuff out ad hoc was pretty boring, so they put it off until later in the day when they got some more materials to actually make stuff (which I had in my room). Then, not only did no one show up, but they had the wrong photo paper so it the process didn’t work anyway. Well, you can’t win ‘em all I guess. I hope that people hold their interest and manage to balance this club with their classes and other activities.