Creative Half-Year in Brief Review

It feels like the past 6 months of school have flown by. I’ve dedicated innumerable hours to my studies, and learned such an incredible breadth and depth of medical knowledge in my lectures. I feel empowered to start my work on the wards in the new year. That said, and despite the weight of all of my academic responsibilities, I’ve made sure to take the time to
get creative, express myself, and build some cool stuff.

In a series of posts to come, I hope to tackle my back-log of projects without write-ups. I’ll try to explain a bit about my process and how my work can be replicated.

Highlight: 3D Printing + Hardware Design

On a rainy evening this past summer I found a 3D printer discarded in the trash on a street in NYC. Seeing that it was structurally intact, and being the ambitious maker that I am, I took it back to my apartment, slowly repairing it to good working order. In the subsequent months I’ve learned so much about everything 3D printer related: the design of 3D parts using tools like Fusion360, OpenSCAD, and FreeCAD; slicing parts effectively for
FDM printing; finishing 3D printed parts; repairing printers; and driving stepper motors.

3D printing has allowed me to design some room-automation hardware that I’ve wanted to build for a very long time. It allowed me to build cases for some of my existing projects, and even produce some more whimsical objects like self-watering plant pots, skull cacti, and marble machines!

I’d previously written a blog using a Ruby framework called Jekyll, hosting for free on Github Pages, but I’ve found the process cumbersome and time consuming. I’ve got so many projects in my back-log to write up, and I’ve learned a lot about docker for web application hosting, so I’m switching over to using this dockerized WordPress instance running on my personal server. I hope it’ll facilitate my writing process (and thus help me more readily express myself).

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more posts!

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