Posts - Page 2 of 6 - The Makerspaces at William & Mary

Summer 2022

We are here. We are making things daily.

If you’re around campus this Summer guess what? So are we! We’ve started gearing up and getting ready to help with the School of Educations’ Camp Launch July 17th-30th as well as already starting to get ready for the Fall Semester! To get ready we’re cleaning, organizing, and training! If you are around and want to learn laser cutting, embroidery, CNC machining, or anything else with which we can help then schedule a session with us in the ‘Make an Appointment’ menu link. All summer long we’ll be here but by appointment only.

Laser Cutter Training

Training on basic embroidery

William & Mary School of Education, Camp Launch July 17th-29th.

CGA, VIMS & Makerspaces at WRL

This past weekend was a great one if you like GIS, drones & books. The Center for Geospatial Analysis, the Virginia Institute for Marine Sciences, and the Makerspaces at William & Mary were at drone day at the Williamsburg Regional Library in Toana. It was a great day to engage with interested peoples of all ages, demonstrate larger scale UAVs such as those used in mapping coastline changes at VIMS, and get younger kids’ hands-on with small drones flying them through an obstacle course. If this sounds like fun, stay tuned for upcoming events with the CGA, VIMS, and the Makerspaces.

Building buildings

A throwback photo from a year ago, here a student used 3D printers and laser cutters to produce his vision for a class project in architectural design.

Maker-made

One particularly creative maker just shared the creation she’s been working on, 3D printed nails! This designer created 3D models for the nails and mapped them onto her scanned finger models. To highlight the maker-made community here at William & Mary, she is also accessorizing with a number of pieces from other community makers. Make sure to check out her work in more detail upcoming in the Flat Hat.

Dancing with Drones

Ever wonder what it’s like to dance with a drone? Here are two EPAD (engineering, physics & applied design) students doing the compass calibration dance in order to, well, calibrate the magnetometer onboard a large sUAS. Lastly, a quick video of the first (successful 🙂 ) test flight of a large octocopter sUAS.

That’s the hot stuff.

Here at William & Mary students are afforded all sorts of awesome opportunities, especially when it comes to working in the labs and gaining experience in undergraduate research. One critical component of the labs is the equipment, and a critical part of being a researcher is understanding the equipment; what better way is there to understand the equipment than to learn how to repair, rebuild, and operate it?

(Below) We helped one particularly talented undergraduate researcher repair and rebuild a tube furnace in one of the labs in the Integrated Science Center. While a tube furnace is little more than a fancy oven, it’s an oven which can go up to over a thousand degrees celsius! This means that in order to repair and rebuild it this particular student learned about high current DC electricity, material science and more.

What’s really important though? She persevered and got it working again (At very bottom)! Good job.

Fix the equipment and now it’s time to science again! 🙂

An undergraduate research student working hard to rebuild laboratory equipment

The rebuilt tube furnace, courtesy of one very talented undergraduate research student!

Water you up to?

This past UAV flightclub day (every Friday morning, 8-11 @ Albert-Daly Field), some senior EPAD students working on their research project were gathering data for their autonomous water sampling payload. Shown in the video below, they are testing the flight characteristics of hanging a scaled down Niskin bottle with and without water. Once completed, and scaled up to our much larger UAV, this tool will be able help provide 1.1L water samples, autonomously, from the Chesapeake Bay watershed to scientists at VIMS and elsewhere.

If you’re interested in learning more about UAVs and getting some flight time in, feel free to stop by the field on Friday mornings! #FlightClub

Tribe Builds 1

Here’s some recent video of laser cutting stainless steel tabs for a robotics project with Dr. Nelson in Physics. #TribeBuilds

We’re hiring!

The Makerspaces at William & Mary are seeking to hire several makerspace student engineers as some members of our currently amazing team are graduating and moving on to change the world! We are looking for passionate makers from all backgrounds. Whether your major is art history or computer science, if you enjoy designing things, working with others, and know what it means to ‘get lost in a build’; find and fill out the job application here on the Makerspaces website.

https://makerspaces.wm.edu/makerspace-student-employment/

We look forward to hearing from you!

UAV Sessions

If you happened to walk by the Makerspace Center in Small Hall yesterday or today you may have heard all sorts of crazy beeps, blips & bleeps. It wasn’t because we were watching Spaceballs, a classic, it was because we were setting up our fleet of UAVs and learning to program autonomous flight for UAV Flight Club day.

Beeps, Blips & Bleeps of the UAV Fleet

If you’d like to learn to fly, program autonomous flight, or build custom UAVs come join us as we explore everything around modern unmanned aerial systems. Maybe even consider getting your FAA part 107 commercial license?

Open to everyone; we meet every Friday morning at the Martin Family Stadium for flights if the weather permits (no precipitation, temp > freezing), or in the Small Hall Makerspaces Center if we have inclement weather.