Makers take over Moseley with showcase of projects

By Oliver Fischer ‘19

From electric bikes to a Harry Potter-inspired clock, the Maker Takeover featured 25 projects from students, faculty and staff at the biggest show-and-tell of the year. The event took place April 25 at Moseley Student Center and was created to showcase the Elon Kickbox projects.

According to senior instructional technologist Dan Reis, a kickbox is a small grant program that provides a student with funds to pursue something they want to make. “It started off as a way to showcase at the end of their semester what they made with that Kickbox, but we’ve also invited other on-campus makers to show off what they made as well,” Reis said.

One of those makers is Shane Roy ’21, who accomplished his dream of building a fully running electric motorcycle.

“I’ve always been a big fan of riding,” Roy said. “It’s been a passion, but my parents would never let me get a motorcycle, so I had to build one.”

One of the biggest challenges Roy faced when building the bike was ensuring structural integrity, but he says it will now do 94 mph.

Next to Roy was junior Sarah Hennenkamp, who was playing an electric guitar with a white 3D-printed body that featured colorful integrated LED lights. She’s an experienced player, but building a guitar is a different kind of challenge, she said. “I didn’t know a lot about building guitars at all, so that was probably the hardest part, figuring out the intonation and all of that,” Hennenkamp said. That didn‘t stop her from doing what she enjoys.

​“It’s my hobby, it’s just relaxing and so fun to see something that you kind of thought of in your head and you’re like ‘this is probably a fantasy but let’s try it,’ and then if it works out, it’s really cool to show off,” Hennenkamp said.

For Jack Dudich ’21, an electric bike is currently one of those fantasies. He hopes to build a full-scale model during the summer that looks like a Harley Davidson chopper.

Unlike Roy’s larger motorcycle, Dudich is looking to create a cheaper transporation alternative for use in traveling short distances. “It’s an easy and fun way to get around campus in a budget situation,” Dudich said. “I enjoy bikes in general and it would be a cool way to reduce my carbon footprint by making a bike and it ends up like doubling as a way to get to classes because I will be living in Danieley next year.”

Elon faculty also put their own creations on display. A “Weasley clock,” based on the Weasley family clock from the Harry Potter books, is the brainchild of Associate Professor of Physics Kyle Altmann.

​The clock has a hand for every person in his family. Each family member has a special app installed on their phones that keeps track of their position and posts a geotag on a server when someone enters a specific location, like the family’s home or Elon University. A Raspberry Pie computer then reads the data from that server to move the clock’s hand of that person to indicate where they are.

“A lot of programming goes into it,” Altmann said. “It was a birthday present for my wife. She always likes to know where everybody is and she’s really happy when we’re all pointing up to home because then the whole family is together.”