Rice U. engineering students design new capo for guitar 

HOUSTON – (May 14, 2013) – A team of Rice University students has designed a new capo for guitar that won’t block players from making certain chords without cramping their fingers.

The capo is a clamp-like device that acts as a sixth finger across the strings.

The students’ attempt to build a better capo was inspired by Rice trustee and alumnus John Jaggers, managing general partner of Dallas venture capital firm Sevin Rosen Funds. In his spare time, Jaggers plays in an acoustic duo with his friend and fellow picker Matthew Carroll. Knowing from experience how well Rice students are trained to think about such issues, Jaggers approached engineering educators at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) to see if his idea struck a chord.

Jaggers said he and Carroll started talking about capos and decided changes were in order.

“I’ve been fairly involved in Rice and a big believer in the OEDK,” Jaggers said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a mechanical design challenge.’” He noted that he and Carroll are not mechanical engineers. “And frankly, we don’t have a lot of time to sit around designing capos. So I thought this might be a great project,” he said.

The team of A.J. Fenton, Eric Stone, Lisa Sampson, Nicki Chamberlain-Simon and Amber Wang took four months this spring to design and build a series of prototypes that flatten out the capo, sweeping the mechanical elements back and out of the way of flying fingers while retaining all the qualities good commercial capos offer: versatility, speed of placement and the convenience of being able to clip it onto the headstock when not needed.

Few think about all the problems the guitar poses for a capo maker. The device acts as the barre, taking the place of the index finger that spans the neck in a barre chord and depressing the strings just enough to create solid contact with the frets but not so much as to throw the tones off-pitch. That lets a player change the key of a song to match one’s vocal range without changing the basic chord shapes.

The capo also has to be forgiving enough to accommodate a variety of guitar necks, which not only change from guitar to guitar, but also along the neck of a single guitar. Finally, it had better not dig into the woodwork.

“Sometimes capos hurt,” the guitar-playing Fenton said as he demonstrated a commercial unit that juts out perpendicularly from the neck. “When you play this F major 7, it presses against your index finger and it’s quite uncomfortable, especially if you want to wrap your thumb all the way around.”

“Most people figure out how to make do and curse a little bit while they play, but it’s pretty awkward,” Jaggers added.

“There are a lot of nuances we didn’t think about before we started, like the curvature of the guitar neck or the materials we had available,” Wang said. “Every single part of the prototype we had to make ourselves. So we had to be creative.”

The students’ final prototype has a two-piece, spring-loaded plastic framework created on a 3-D printer with a hard rubber strip that contacts and gently clamps the strings. While it’s not yet perfect – the capo has to be placed just so – the teammates feel they’ve come a long way in four months toward the guitarists’ goal.

They expect the capo project will continue next year, perhaps with a new team of students to work with advisers Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of engineering education, and Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer in engineering.

Watch a video about the capo project here: http://youtu.be/HwHlp79ld9

 

 

 

 

 

Team Brittle Bones wins Design Showcase

Team Brittle Bones won the top Excellence in Engineering Design award in the Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition April 11 at Rice’s Tudor Fieldhouse.

The team members – Matthew Nojoomi, Nimish Mittal and Sergio Gonzalez – received a $5,000 grand prize for their robotic assistive reaching mechanism for a patient at Shriners Hospital. They began the project in the freshman engineering class taught by their adviser, Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering, and continued working on it into their sophomore years.

Teams shine at Rice Undergraduate Venture Challenge

OwlSpark to ignite entrepreneurship on campus

As the semester draws to a close, most Rice University students are preparing to head home for the summer, but a few groups of students will be getting down to business on campus.

OwlSpark, a student-founded organization created to ignite entrepreneurship at Rice, will launch its 90-day summer startup accelerator experience next month in Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

Will Rice College students Veronica Saron, Vivas Kumar and Ian Akash Morrison and Rice MBA student Darren Clifford founded the group, which provides Rice-affiliated startup teams with the resources to launch companies and technologies. Companies accepted to participate in the accelerator will have access to a list of mentors, seed funding, space and other valuable entrepreneurial resources both from the Rice and Houston communities.

Saron said that since the organization was created last spring, there’s been a “huge upswing” in the entrepreneurial spirit at Rice.

“Since we launched the idea, we’ve talked to a lot of different people and engaged a lot of stakeholders,” she said. “And affiliated organizations have hosted many events geared at entrepreneurship on campus. For example, our affiliate organization OwlSquad (Rice’s student-run organization working to support the spirit and practice of entrepreneurship at the university) hosted the Entrepreneurship Summit in January, which drew 165 students and several members of the Houston community.”

To apply, interested individuals must have a well-developed business idea and/or prototype for a unique technology. Candidates must complete an application detailing their business venture and participate in a rigorous interview and vetting process with the OwlSpark co-founders and board of advisers. The board of advisers includes Rice Provost George McLendon, Rice Alliance Managing Director Brad Burke, Rice Trustee John Jaggers ’73, former Rice Student Association President Mitra Miller Roehr ’92, Houston Angel Network Investor Hayden Hill, Mercury Fund Managing Director Blair Garrou and Rice Center for Engineering Leadership Entrepreneur-In-Residence Bryan Hassin ’01.

The accelerator will host up to 10 companies; five have already been accepted for this summer. The companies include undergraduate and graduate students from many different schools across campus, which Saron said shows that entrepreneurship isn’t just for business majors.

At the end of the summer program, OwlSpark will provide its companies access to the working space for an additional 270 days to help them grow revenue after the formal program ends.

Saron said that she and her fellow founders are especially appreciative of the input from the Rice Alliance, Rice’s internationally recognized initiative devoted to the support of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship education and the launch of technology companies.

“(The Rice Alliance) made Rice into a lightning rod nationwide for entrepreneurship,” she said. “If it weren’t for the Rice Alliance, I don’t think we’d be able to do what we’re doing.”

Kumar envisions that the program is the first step in Rice University’s mission to provide more entrepreneurial opportunities and a greater holistic educational experience for students.

“President (David) Leebron laid out a challenge to the university in his Centennial Address of his vision for Rice as a more entrepreneurial university,” Kumar said. “The embedding of OwlSpark within the Rice University experience will pay significant dividends in the long term for the establishment of the university as a pioneer in entrepreneurism.”

The co-founders, participating companies, and board of advisers will be hosting a launch party at their collaboration space in the BRC, 6500 Main St., from 5 to 7 p.m. May 16; to attend, interested individuals should RSVP at http://owlspark.eventbrite.com/.

Houston Chronicle

Space station visitors can thank Rice students for the delicious coffee

By Craig Hlavaty | April 24, 2013 | Updated: April 24, 2013 1:00pm

MORE COVERAGE:  http://www.gizmag.com/space-coffee-as-you-like-it/27271/

Rice students build bridge for Houston Arboretum

Team will compete in Thursday’s Engineering Design Showcase at Rice

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Team Tree Amigos from Rice University had to build a bridge at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, and not one of its four members knew the first thing about structural engineering.

“Nobody involved is planning to go into civil engineering,” said Kathryn Hokamp, a freshman at Rice who plans to major in ecology and evolutionary biology and who served as construction foreman for the engineering design team. “Some of us had never used power tools. We had our dark periods.”

The students first met last fall in their Introduction to Engineering Design class. The other team members and their tentative majors are Michael Donatti, mechanical engineering; Stephen Phillips, bioengineering; and Katherine Stiles, chemical engineering.

“We didn’t know each other,” Donatti said. “We didn’t start out as friends, but we learned how to work in a team setting. The chemistry was pretty good. Basically, we were learning how to learn.”

The staff at the arboretum presented Tree Amigos with a straightforward problem: The low spot between the playground and a nearby pavilion routinely floods after heavy rains. More than a foot of water can accumulate and remain in place for several days. The span had to be at least 13 feet long, not counting the platforms at either end, to bypass the water and mud.

In their early brainstorming sessions, after three or four visits to the arboretum, the team came up with about 80 potential solutions, some extravagant or ridiculous. Additional meetings with arboretum staff and a review of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s regulations for public playground safety reduced the workable solutions to one. By October they had a final plan for a suspended wooden bridge – one frequently tweaked, however, by contingency.

The arboretum staff poured the foundation – eight cylinders of concrete, each 8 inches in diameter and 4 feet deep. The team used more than 250 board feet of lumber, more than 85 percent of which was “repurposed” – that is, recycled from use in previous structures. Thus, their choice of team name: Tree Amigos. They intended the project to be ecologically benign, relying as much as possible on recycled material.

They also used 400 pounds of concrete, 45 feet of high-test steel chain (with a load limit of 5,400 pounds), more than 400 bolts and other pieces of hardware, eight steel posts and 80 feet of rope (for handholds across the span).

“All of the other teams had, physically speaking, smaller projects,” Stiles said. “We couldn’t really prototype anything. It was just too big.”

With the foundation in place, the rest of the work was completed in a single day, Feb. 16, between 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. “We had to make adjustments,” said Hokamp, who took wood shop in high school. “Some of the pieces in the foundation were uneven, off a little. It was like a trapezoid.”

“A slight rhombus, really,” Stiles added.

The arboretum has posted a sign limiting the number of children crossing the bridge at one time to three. Donatti knows better: “This thing is built to hold six adults, each weighing 200 pounds. It’s solid.”

The Amigos will be on hand to talk about their project as one of dozens on display at Rice’s Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition from 4:30 to 7 p.m. April 11 at Tudor Fieldhouse on the Rice campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Bryan Hassin, RCEL’s entrepreneur in residence, has published his TEDx talk about entrepreneurship. He gave the talk last year, explaining what he and others are doing to teach entrepreneurship at Rice. You can see a video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apQfxfXSfU and his slides at http://www.slideshare.net/guido23/the-entrepreneurs-journey.

Freshmen and sophomores! Just in time for fall registration, RCEL is excited to be launching the new Certificate in Engineering Leadership. It builds on the excellent engineering program you are already plugged into, but will take things in a new direction. Forget the faulty idea that "leaders are natural born." Instead, you'll be trained in the key skills to be a great team leader and team member. The program includes active leadership and team building labs, coursework in leading teams and innovation, and professional internships. You can find out more about this program at http://www.rcel.rice.edu/certificate. Check it out!

The Owlsquad team reports that it's most recent "3-Day Start" up was a  success! A small but enthusiastic group of four teams, nine mentors, and four panelists spent the entire weekend at McNair Hall developing Minimum Viable Products and creating pitch decks. The undergraduates, graduate students, and MBAs worked together for three days (some nights until 7 am) to get their companies off the ground and capitalize on mentor feedback and guidance. The companies are Parkit, Modern Sportsman, Clear Note, and BETA, and I’m looking forward to what these entrepreneurs will accomplish in the weeks to come through a strong relationship with Platform Houston.