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Ambitious Students, Makers and Innovators In the number three spot is a solar car team from the University of Waterloo in Toronto, Canada: The Midnight Sun Solar Car team. Relive the guts and the glory of this ambitious team. Congratulations, Midnight Sun Solar Team. Thank you for your pursuit of excellence and being an inspiration for our readers! Taking the number two spot is the New Jersey Institute of Technology SAE Baja team that earned first place in the endurance race, and 13th Read Article

Student-Designed Solar Cars from Down Under Judy Warner: Please share how your team was started, how many cars you have built to date, and give us an overview of Violet. Kristian Bojidarov: Sunswift is a team of undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales who design, build and race the world’s most advanced solar-electric vehicles. With the knowledge gained since Sunswift’s founding in 1995, the team has recently completed the manufacture of our sixth vehicle, Violet Read Article

Left Hand Robotics Autonomous Snowbot Judy Warner: Shane, so nice to meet you. Before we get started, I just had to ask what the story is behind your unique name? Shane Zinner: In this area, there was an American Indian Chief Niwot or Left Hand (-ed) (c. 1825–1864) who was a tribal leader of the Southern Arapaho people and played an important part in the history of Colorado. Many 'Left Hand' things, such as Left Hand Canyon, Left Hand Brewery, and the town of Niwot, Colorado were Read Article

Princeton Racing Electrical Team and the Formula Hybrid Competition Judy Warner: It is a pleasure to meet you both. Jasper, let’s begin with you. Will you please share what the Princeton Racing Electric team does, how the team was formed, and in what year? Jasper Gebhardt: Princeton Racing Electric is a team of students who design, build, and race single-seat electric race cars. We compete in the Formula SAE collegiate design competitions, in particular, the Formula Hybrid competition. The team was founded by Read Article

Azevedo the ITAndroids: Humanoid Robot Soccer Team Judy Warner: How long has the ITAndroids team been in existence, and how did it get started? Arthur Azevedo: The ITAndroids team was created in 2005 by Jackson Matsura. Back then he was a masters student, now he is a professor in the electronics department. Two undergraduate students and another master’s student joined the team. They won the Latin America RoboCup (LARC) 2D Soccer Simulation that year. They quickly became one of the Latin American Read Article

Frank Duggan: Micro Architecture and Aspiring to MIT Judy Warner: What first got you interested in developing your own microarchitecture using discrete logic? Frank Duggan: Without really knowing the specifics, it was something I'd wanted to do since I was little. I was obsessed with my Snap Circuits electronics kit, and liked to challenge myself to build circuits that do various things. At some point, I decided that building a computer was the ultimate challenge. This was probably because I found Read Article

Solar Cars of the Future Pioneered by Midnight Sun Solar Design Team Since the 1988-1989 academic year the University of Waterloo’s Midnight Sun solar team, under the guidance of faculty advisor Professor Gordon Savage, has been building and competing in the American Solar Challenge (ASC) and the World Solar Challenge (WSC). Each of these competitions are held alternately every other year. Running the helm of the electrical systems team are Minghou Ji (Engineering Manager), Yifei Li (Hardware Engineer) and Taiping Read Article

PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit In response to a grassroots swell of “makers”, Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it Read Article

Badgerloop’s Run for Hyperloop Glory Captures the Attention of Elon Musk Team Badgerloop at the June Pod II Reveal In 2013, Elon Musk introduced the concept of a Hyperloop transit system in a white paper. He proposed a completely open source approach to its development and invited universities to participate in a pod competition. SpaceX funded the construction of a near-mile subscale version of a vacuum tube in which to trial pods for the competition. For the first competition, only 3 pods would earn an opportunity to Read Article

Meet the Baja Racing Team from New Jersey Institute of Technology Bob Burghart is a Sophomore who is studying Mechanical Engineering at NJIT, and is the leader of the sub-team responsible for electronics designs for their Baja racing car. In the car, there is a main dash system, a data acquisition board, a display board, and front and rear dongles that connect to 20 sensors. As a kid, Bob had the typical curious mind of a budding engineer--always enjoying taking things apart. By middle and high school he began Read Article

FIRST Robotics Competition Makes STEM Students into Superstars Over 25 years ago, FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) founder and prolific inventor, Dean Kamen, envisioned a high school robotics competition that rivaled the energy and excitement of the Super Bowl. An event that would turn science students into superstars and infect them with an unshakeable passion for STEM activities and careers. Chris Jennings has an infectious enthusiasm for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), as well as a rich history with Read Article

Which Altium PCB Design Software is Right For You? Confused as to which Altium professional PCB design product is right for you? Are you just looking to dip a toe with CircuitMaker^®? Are you a professional PCB just starting out or are you a full blown Printed Board design maestro who needs all the flexible horsepower that Altium Designer^® offers? Find out what Altium software is right for you. Our CMO, Ted Pawela, recently did a live interview with the folks over at Adafruit. One of the questions Read Article

10:42 CircuitMaker Fair 2016 Watch Video

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How to Maximize Copper in Your PCB Design: The Pros and Cons of Copper Pouring Versus Placing Image Source: Flickr user billautomata (CC BY 2.0) There is a saying in copper pour PCB layout, “Copper is free.” It means a printed circuit board editor designer must think in reverse. A circuit board starts off as solid copper, and the copper you don’t want is removed. It is faster to build, less consumptive, and less expensive to make a printed circuit board that is mostly copper as compared to the same size board that is mostly bare. Picking Read Article

Experience a Completely Unified Design Environment With today’s ever growing market expectations, strict project deadlines, and increasingly complex designs, what solutions exist to minimize the time spent switching between your design tools to complete projects? Now you can successfully deliver products on time and within budget in a completely unified design environment. Read on to find out how. Do you feel like your schematic and pcb tools are from different planets? Are you still using a Read Article