Course Description (Excerpt)
Develops students’ competence and self-confidence as design engineers. Emphasis on the creative design process bolstered by application of physical laws. Instruction on how to complete projects on schedule and within budget. Robustness and manufacturability are emphasized. Subject relies on active learning via a major design-and-build project. Lecture topics include idea generation, estimation, concept selection, visual thinking, computer-aided design (CAD), mechanism design, machine elements, basic electronics, technical communication, and ethics.
About the Project
2.007 Design and Manufacturing I is a part of MIT’s core undergraduate coursework for Mechanical Engineering (Course 2). The goals of the course are to teach students to apply the engineering skills learned in previous semesters to design thinking. The course also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a proper engineering notebook, properly documenting your design process, and justfying your design choices with engineering principles (and staying under budget).
Each year, the course staff build a (heavily) themed competition field to test our robots against various tasks. This course was the inspiration for FIRST Robotics, so for those who are familiar with that challenge paradigm, this course is very similar!
Our theme was “May the Torque Be With You”, A Star Wars themed challenge featuring an X-Wing starfighter, lightsabers, Stromtroopers, and the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader!
My Contributions
This was a solo project in which I designed, built, and programmed every component of the robot from the ground up.
Skills
Computer-Aided Design (Solidworks), Milling, Turning (Lathe), 3D Printing, Hand Tools, Design Thinking, Arduino, C++