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Indulging Innovation
Tomorrow’s engineers tinker with purpose in the new M5 lab in Marcus Hall
Marcus Hall’s new lab, known as M5, brims with circuits, chips, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, and other equipment to encourage research and design skills. Open to students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), it’s where, as one student puts it, majors can “do their Rube Goldberg thing.”
In addition to free access to electronic components and specialized test equipment, M5 houses a design-oriented reference library, a “junk room” with old electronics for students to use for parts or reverse-engineering, and an audio engineering workstation.
The facility is the brainchild of ECE’s department head, Professor Christopher Hollot, and his colleague Professor Baird Soules. “The desire to tinker is a terrible thing to waste,” Soules explains. “Traditionally, the urge to take stuff apart and figure out how it works has been the hallmark of engineers-to-be. The miniaturization of electronics in modern commercial products has made discovery activity more challenging, and M5 helps counter that.”
It certainly has for sophomore Josh Lowe, who at M5 has combined surplus parts to build a robotic claw. Dan Bercht, also a sophomore, adapted a vintage Atari joystick to control the speed of a tape player to create nightclub-style musical gyrations. He has used a microcontroller to gauge and send spatial data to virtually model physical surroundings.
Bercht says M5’s social component is also a big draw. “People are not just working on projects,” he says. “They’re also doing homework or studying or hanging out. So we’re really getting to know each other in ways we couldn’t before, because we didn’t have a place to call home.”