Makers was started in the Fall of 2016 by three engineering students at the University of Southern California as an effort to promote more innovation and interest in electronics on campus. The mission of Makers is to facilitate the exploration of concepts in electronics design and stimulate interest in fields of electronics such as the Internet of Things, Embedded Systems, and Robotics. The organization hopes to serve as a resource for its community by offering its assistance with electronics-related projects and hosting workshops that are open to the general public.
MAKERS has a dedicated eboard focused on delivering the best experience for MAKERS members, and to foster an encouraging and creative environment
Waterbender's goal is to create an interactive art installation that will be deployed on campus upon completion. The project allows users to interact with the project in different ways, i.e. drawing their own 2D rasterized designs, and then see them displayed by streams of water. This project was inspired by an advertisement that used droplets of water to create 3D animations frame by frame, that were later stitched together to form a video. While visually impressive, the advertisement required significant production work to create the animation -- Waterbender makes the art piece more interactive so that users can see their design live.
The goal of this project was to design and build an IDEX (Independent-Dual-Extrusion) 3D printer with dual-color printing capability, and an experimental automated part removal mechanism as we named it Pusha. We are scrapping parts from a Luizbot TAZ Pro 3D printer and retaining the general chassis design. We designed many components in-house while also remixing from open-source 3D printer projects. We have three subteams working on the IDEX capability, the pusha gantrysystem, and the slack integration and computer vision aspect.
The goal of this project was to make our own version of the Suzuki Omnichord. We used the "Le Strum" DIY midi controller as the base of our instrument and then used open-source software on a raspberry pi to output sound. For finishing touches, we are building an enclosure and putting together circuitry to form a cohesive instrument. We also designed a web interface to sample sounds to make custom sound fonts to be used on the instrument.
Zooming Kitties is an autonomous rover designed to carry a cat like a motorized cat stroller. The rover can be operated through a remote control such as an Xbox controller or navigate on its own to destinations using its GPS and IMU sensors. Operators can see a first person view of what is in front of the rover by wearing FPV goggles, allowing for beyond line of sight operation. The rover is also equipped with computer vision capabilities, allowing it to track and follow subjects on its own.
Starry Starry Bot uses an astronomy laser pointer to point out stars in the night sky. The data processing pipeline of the project allows the robot's user to both pick stars to point out in the sky and identify unknown stars. Group stargazing events would be perfect times to bring along Starry Starry Bot as a stargazing assistant robot. The robot is portable and easily interfaced with through a graphical user interface, such that someone can bring the robot along to a stargazing site in order to better understand the sky above them.
Paper Airplayin's goal was to create a lightweight flight module that motorizes paper airplanes. This module is designed to fit onto most shapes and sizes of paper airplanes, and it offers the user relibale control over three degrees of motion. The inspiration for this project came from a desire to transform this popular childhood pastime into one that can be thoroughly enjoyed by everyone and enthrall even the older audiences.
The main goal of RamseyBot was to create a fun, interactive robot that imitates Gordon Ramsay, and "tastes" food by electrical resistivity. It can be controlled by a remote controller, with joysticks for control of movement. There will be buttons on the controller to engage in fun features like speaking lines Gordon Ramsay has said, or moving his mechanically made arm.
Electrobike is about converting a regular mountain bike into a super powerful electric bike. It doesn't have any petals, because who needs those when you have 2kW of motor power? The bike uses a Raspberry Pi to interface with sensors and a custom phone app dashboard.
This project is based off of Space Force Season I Episode I, an episode I know we all remember where Steve Carell's character storms out of the UN meeting, and in desperation starts singing Kokomo. Once he is several verses into signing, Kokomo the song begins playing, and grows over time into a full-blown musical. Kokomo aka PartyBot, a physical robot, has the same objective. From a person singing, Kokomo will identify words, look up lyrics from those words, start playing the song being sung, and drive over to the singer.
The goal of Talaria was to harness the kinetic energy from walking to charge a battery located within a shoe, and then use the power in this battery to charge a cellular device. Piezoelectric crystal discs were used to harness the kinetic energy while walking from the compression and decompression that occurs within the sole of a shoe for every step. This product, which focuses on power electronics and wearable devices, enables the user to charge their phone on the go, which would be extremely beneficial when in remote locations without access to a phone charger.
This project aimed to build a Star Wars-themed droid in the shame of a cube. Similar to how the BB-8 droid is a spherical droid that rolls around with a head on top, QB-7 is a cubic droid that can "walk" on its own by flopping onto its side in the direction it intends to go.
