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Bianchini-Love
Sand Cast Engagement Rings
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
This is a special project that we are excited to present. During our last semester as undergraduates at MIT, we set out to create our own engagement rings. While the final rings are made of platinum, a pair of bronze and stainless steel rings were also made as part of the experimental process. In addition to the rings, we also created a wooden box to protect and house the rings when not on a finger. Built in the Course 3 foundry at MIT, the final product is a unique set of rings that have a special meaning to both of us.
Love
Website
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
This page documents the build process I've put into this website. I've always felt a need to document my work as I build projects, so I decided to make this site. It's been quite a learning process and has been an off-and-on side project of mine, mostly something I chip away at while not in school.
Love
554 Watt Spark Gap Tesla Coil
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
This is a project I completed in high school with Julian Thomassie - a close friend, and was our introduction to the world of high voltage. The purpose of this project was to learn the theory behind the operation of a resonant transformer and to successfully build a medium sized Tesla coil. A Tesla coil is a special type of transformer that generates large plasma arcs by increasing the voltage of the input current in two steps. The first step is the neon sign transformer which increases the standard 120V of a household wall outlet to 9 kV (in our case). Voltage is then stepped up again, but this time using two inductor-capacitor (LC) circuits tuned to the same resonant frequency. Matching the resonant frequencies of the two circuits allows for much larger voltage outputs than a conventional, non-resonant transformer. All of the safety features that seemed necessary in the circuit were included to ensure safe operation.
Love
96.9MHz Dipole Harvester
Updated: Sep 29, 2019
This energy harvester was created with a team of 4 other members as part of the MIT class 6.013: Electromagnetics and Applications. This project was very open ended, and had to incorporate a topic covered in the class at some point in the semester. This project focuses on dipole antenna design and includes some basic circuit design. As one of the tallest in Boston, the Prudential center is optimal for transmitting radio stations from its antenna/mast at the top of the building. This 96.6MHz dipole harvester harvests energy transmitted by the Prudential building and uses the harvested energy to flash an LED.
Bianchini
Pentris Python Computer Game
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
I made this advanced version of Tetris as a project for 15.112 Fundamentals of Programming as a part of Carnegie Mellon University's precollege program. Using Python 2 and TkInter to produce the simple GUI, I made Pentris like Tetris, but where all pieces have 5 blocks in them instead of 4. Additional features include mirroring pieces, piece previews, hard drops, and high score tables.
Bianchini-Love
Simple Clock
Updated: Sep 27, 2019
Simple clock is a just as the name implies: a minimalistic clock that has one button and one potentiometer and no extraneous features. The button is used to set the time; pressing and holding the button speeds up the seconds by a factor of 250 and a prolonged press of the button (after pressing the button for roughly 6 seconds real time) puts the clock into super fast mode, with one hour ticking by approximately every second. The potentiometer controls the brightness of the entire display, including the colons. This project uses the display and part of the code from Henry's final project from 6.115 - Microcomputer Project Laboratory. After re-discovering the breadboarded 7-segments displays, the project was resurrected and behold SIMPLE CLOCK!!!!
Bianchini
Baseball Music Box
Updated: Apr 13, 2019
I wanted to build a unique engineering-focused display for a baseball in a way that would make people laugh. I used this idea for my project in Stanford's class ME203 Design and Manufacturing. My inspiration came from my desire to make a gift for a family friend whose was a Major League baseball player when he was younger, then became an engineer for the rest of his career. Thus, a baseball display with exposed engineering elements would be the perfect way for my friend to display a piece of his young and later life in her apartment.
Bianchini-Love
Wakeboard for Bianchinis
Updated: Apr 20, 2019
If you know the Bianchinis, you know that they love water sports. After spending time with the Bianchinis during the summer of 2017, Henry wanted to create a gift for them. Henry's Crocs are a point of contention between him and Mrs. Bianchini, so (mostly) as a joke, he decided to create a wakeboard with boots as Crocs. Please note that this wakeboard is not intended to be used as a real wakeboard; it's intended to be a wall piece, or a funny item. As one of the smallest people you'll ever meet, the boots and wakeboard are sized to fit Mrs. Bianchini's (with maybe a bit of exaggeration...) since Henry noticed all but she had a wakeboard to use.
Love
Wall Light
Updated: Apr 20, 2019
When I was walking back to my dorm after class, I found a beautiful piece of wood outside the MIT 2.008 machine shop being thrown away with a bunch of other things. It was once a block of wood for holding endmills/bits with a natural patina from years of machine oil and grease. The wood block had some small aluminum chips embedded in it, however, I didn’t try to get those out, because they tell its story as a block of wood from an MIT machine shop. This was too good to pass up, so I grabbed it. After some thinking, I decided to make a wall lamp out of the piece of wood and made it a (late… oops…) gift for Bibit’s 23rd birthday.
Bianchini-Love
Lock Picking Set
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
This project spun out of the idea to do a project in one day (this ended up taking 2 days, with a few days in between). Henry and Bibit decided to make a lock picking set because a friend had recently gotten one, which we had grown fond of. Over the course of the project, we used a water jet, a laser cutter, a Prototrak Mill, a lathe, and an Othermill, using materials including steel, aluminum, and two types of wood.
Bianchini
Industrial Design of a Home Solar Energy System
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
The MIT Development Lab (D-Lab) connects student teams with international community partners who work on projects to better developing communities. Through a D-Lab class, I partnered with Voya Sol, a company that develops home solar energy systems for rural Zimbabweans to build their own micro grids. I and my team focused on the industrial design of the appliance, including the user interface and features that would define how the appliance lives in the home.
Bianchini
Herreshoff Steam Engine
Updated: Aug 06, 2020
For my undergraduate thesis, I documented my process in manufacturing sand cast parts for a 1897 Herreshoff steam engine. The project got started through the Pappalardo Apprenticeship program I had joined the previous year. The final functional steam engine is part of a demonstration at an MIT Museum exhibit on Nathanael Greene Herreshoff that opened in fall 2018. I manufactured four of the engine components: the iron column, two iron gibs, and the bronze bearing crosshead.
Bianchini
Lamp
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
As a result of my learning how to weld and use new pieces of machinery, I built a steel, wall-mounted, cantilevered lamp that would fit the constraints of my bedroom. It functions as a simple lamp with a dimmer switch, but the unique design incorporates a slender, wall-mounted body that fits within the three-inch piece of wall between my bed's headboard and a stair railing. The 3-foot blackened steel arm is supported by a thin bicycle cable and can swing in a 180-degree arc from over the middle of my bed to over the stairwell in my room. The head of the lamp rotates to direct light.
Love
Dynamic Bash Command Prompt Highlighting
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
In this project, I created dynamic coloring for my bash command prompt. There are a variety of shells for the command line, however the code presented below is designed for bash Unix shell, the default login shell used for Apple's macOS. While there are many third party resources that make it easy to change the color of your command prompt, the majority of them do not support dynamic prompt coloring - that is, coloring that changes to facilitate the reading of your working directory. This post goes over how to add dynamic command prompt coloring to your bash shell and discusses a few ways to customize your prompt appearance!
Bianchini-Love
Peg Chair
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
Inspired by a chair found in an MIT machine shop, we built a peg chair, designed as a way to temporarily "sit" and take > 50% of the weight off your feet. The height is adjustable, and the seat is easily replaceable with any standard-mount bicycle seat. It's a quirky way to pseudo-sit-stand or an efficient way to produce another seat for more guests.
Bianchini
Struct Surprise Toy Blocks
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
I built Struct with a team of 4 other members as part of the MIT class 2.00B. One of MIT's most popular classes, 2.00B Toy Product Design taught by Professor David Wallace and Dr. Maria Yang gives students an overview of design for entertainment purposes. Throughout the process, students develop ideas for new toys that serve clients in the community, and work in teams with local sponsors and experienced mentors on a themed toy design project. The spring 2015 theme was "Surprise"! We made a set of identical (looking) blocks that each behaved differently and surprisingly when interacting with it in a hands-on way.
Bianchini
Mass-Manufactured Nautical Yo-Yos
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
My team of 5 people designed a nautical-themed yo-yo, which we designed for mass manufacturing and of which we fabricated 50. We learned how to design for manufacture, to use injection molding and thermoforming machines, and to use MasterCAM to program CNC mills and lathes. I specifically did the design, tooling manufacturing, and production run of the ship steering wheel featured on both sides of the yo-yo.
Bianchini
Go-Karts
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
My dad and I originally got the idea of building go-karts when I was 4 years old. After two wooden boards with wheels sat for years in our playroom, we decided we wanted to finish the project when I was 9. The humble vision of a push-powered soapbox derby transformed into three customized, eye-catching electric go-karts with forward and reverse drive, horn, headlights, and personalized paint jobs for my and my sisters' unique personalities.
Love
Sea Glass Necklace
Updated: Apr 20, 2019
After going to Revere beach with some friends and finding a lot of sea glass, I decided to do something with some of the glass I found and make a necklace for Bibit. Sea glass is glass that is naturally weathered by the ocean waves and sand, leading to a frosted, smooth surface on glass that has been in the sea for years. According to Wikipedia, sea glass can take 20 - 40 years, sometimes up to 100 years to achieve its rounded and frosted appearance. This makes it a "cool" artifact to use to make jewelry. In addition, it's cheap (free if found on the beach), and no two pieces are exactly alike. On this trip, I found approximately 30 pieces of glass and settled on two to use in this necklace. With some experimentation and trial and error, this necklace was produced!
Love
Analog Drawing Board
Updated: Feb 03, 2019
This was a team project I worked on with Nicholas Klugman as our final project for 6.101 - Analog Electronics Lab. Most technology created today is created with the intent of being used by an individual. The way humans interact with technology is highly important and can determine whether or not a product is successful. Because of this, the way in which people interact with technology cannot be overlooked. This project focuses on bridging the gap between technology and a user; providing an easy and familiar way for humans to interact with a product. In this project, a wireless drawing board was created, where a user can draw on a piece of resistive paper and have it displayed on a screen of an oscilloscope. The user interface developed in this project was inspired by a touchpad/drawing board where the user holds a stylus that controls the location of a cursor on a screen. While the goal of interfacing to a real computer was not demonstrated, proof of concept has shown that one can wireless transmit cursor location to a receiver that can decode and make use of the data. The connection between the board and the computer is wireless, using a hybrid of frequency and amplitude modulation. This project has three main elements: the drawing board and the circuitry that drives it (“Drawing Board” and “Drawing Board Driver”), encoding and sending this data wirelessly to a receiver (“Voltage Scaler”, “VCO”, and “Transmitter”), and decoding this information so it can displayed on a screen (“Receiver”, “Frequency to Voltage”, and “Display”)
Love
FPGA Beethoven
Updated: Sep 18, 2022
I worked on this project with Mark Yang as our final project for 6.111 - Introductory Digital Systems Laboratory. Let's jump right in! Being able to hear what is on sheet music is very helpful to musicians beginning to learn a piece of music. Having auditory input can help people learn notes and rhythm more quickly and correct current mistakes. To make the transfer of sheet music to sound, we propose a digital music reading machine. This project will process a digital image of a score, and play the notes back to the user. There are two main parts to this project; note recognition (pitch and rhythm) and audio playback. This project starts with the reading of simple notes, rhythms and key signatures. If time permits, this project will evolve to read a score, notes that do not lie on the ledger lines, and music with accidentals. A user interface will allow the user to input the tempo and key signature of the piece before sight reading occurs.
Bianchini
Generalization Bounded Implicit Learning of Nearly Discontinuous Functions
Updated: Sep 26, 2022
This post goes along with the paper I published at the 4th annual Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC) in 2022. My co-authors are fellow Penn PhD student, Mathew Halm, as well as Penn faculty Michael Posa and Nikolai Matni.
Bianchini
Live ContactNets Demo with Franka Arm
Updated: Sep 26, 2022
At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2022 in Philadelphia, we took advantage over the conference being in our neighborhood and performed live demonstrations of our ContactNets project. The demo featured a Franka Panda robotic arm tossing a test object onto a table, and learning the object's geometry just by observing its contact-rich trajectory. My collaborators are fellow Penn PhD student Mathew Halm, Penn masters student Kausik Sivakumar, and Penn faculty Michael Posa.
Bianchini
Avoiding Poor Generalizability of Differentiable Simulation
Updated: Sep 19, 2022
This post goes along with the presentation I gave at the workshop on Differentiable Physics for Robotics at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in 2022. I presented work on which I collaborated with fellow Penn PhD student, Mathew Halm, and Penn faculty Michael Posa.
Bianchini-Love
Simple Clock PCBs
Updated: Sep 18, 2022
After completing our Simple Clock project, which housed four breadboards full of clock components, we decided to make a PCB version. This version has all of the same components and capabilities of Simple Clock, all in a much smaller form factor that we designed to comfortably sit on a surface.
Bianchini
Space Taco Corgi: Mechatronic Robot
Updated: Sep 26, 2022
For the notorious Stanford mechatronics course project, 3 of my classmates and I constructed a robot designed to play the 2019 ME218B challenge: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Designed to compete in 1-on-1 matches, autonomous robots were designed to commence when they received a start game signal, collect "garbage" (foam balls) throughout the game field, try to recycle as many as they could based on the garbage color, then throw the rest away into a landfill. All actions were autonomous, including localization, given that the robots were started in a random configuration every match.
Bianchini
Towards Human Haptic Gesture Interpretation for Robotic Systems
Updated: Sep 26, 2022
This post goes along with the paper I published at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in 2021 on research I conducted during my masters program. My co-authors are Stanford researcher, Prateek Verma, as well as Stanford faculty Ken Salisbury.
Bianchini
Robotic Manipulation Reading Group
Updated: Apr 24, 2023
This is the official paper archive of the Manipulation Reading Group started by members of Penn's DAIR Lab. The group meets weekly to go over papers devoted to robotic manipulation. Everyone is welcome. At the time of updating this post, our meetings occur in person, though feel free to reach out to me via email if you are not in the Philadelphia area and would like to request a virtual participation option.
Bianchini-Love
Stained Glass Window
Updated: Jan 02, 2024
Our row house did not previously come with visible house numbers on display. We took advantage over the transom window above our front door to make a stained glass window that features our house number. This was a new process for both of us, and we were surprised by how beginner-friendly it was, requiring only a couple of new glass cutting hand tools and an upgrade to a heavy duty soldering gun.
Bianchini-Love
Aluminum Rubik's Cube
Updated: Mar 29, 2024
This is a long term project primarily for learning purposes and a novel product. I admire design and art, so this build can be considered an art project depending on the way you look at it. I'm working on this project with Bibit as my machining skills can easily use the help of an actual mechanical engineer. The goal is to create an Rubik's cubed machined out of aluminum that is the size of a standard Rubik's cube with 0.75" sub-cubes. Some adjustments are being made as the build progresses, so stay tuned for updates!
Bianchini
Simultaneous Learning of Contact and Continuous Dynamics
Updated: Mar 29, 2024
We published our work on data efficient model building through contact in a paper at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023 in Atlanta, GA. My co-authors are recent Penn PhD graduate Mathew Halm and our advisor, Professor Michael Posa. Our project simultaneously built contact and continuous dynamics of novel, possibly multi-link objects by observing their dynamics through collision-rife trajectory data.
Bianchini
Sampling-Based MPC for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Updated: Mar 27, 2024
We were invited to give a talk at the Workshop on Leveraging Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023 in Detroit, MI. I presented our progress on a contact-implicit robot controller for performing manipulation tasks. The controller works in real time thanks to local models that still preserve contact-derived multimodality, injected with global insights from sampling hypothetical end effector locations.