Thank you for your interest in M5. M5 is the ECE makerspace. It serves the ECE students with a 5,000 sq. ft. facility, test equipment, a machine shop, hundreds of electronic and mechanical components and most importantly, a very helpful staff of fifteen undergraduate engineering interns who help their classmates enhance their ECE education through hands-on projects.
If you are an ECE alum you may already know me. I'm Baird Soules, the founding director of M5. I would very much appreciate your financial support of M5! This particular M5 UMassGives campaign is aimed at getting as many Arduino and Raspberry Pi computer experimentation kits into the hands of ECE students as possible. We have found that the Arduino (C programming) and Raspberry Pi (Linux, Python) experimentation platforms are very effective at making the in-course ECE material they learn more tangible. Let's see how many kits we can get out there!
We'll have a showcase of the resulting projects in December 2022 and April 2023. We call the showcase Circuits and Code and we'd love for you to come! The next Circuits and Code will be held on Saturday, April 30 from 3 to 5 pm, right here at M5, in the lower level of Marcus Hall. Please give me a heads up if you are planning to come.
Here is some of what we do at M5:
Technical workshops:
Arduino and Raspberry Pi embedded systems workshops
KiCAD and Altium PCB design workshops and training videos
(please see the UMass Amherst M5 YouTube channel - please subscribe!)
Soldering workshops
Machine Shop trainings (safety and operational)
Electronic prototyping Workshops
CircuitPython programming workshops (Python for microcontrollers)
3D printing training (file preparation, design considerations)
Printing 3D objects on our Ultimaker printer
Daily project debugging/troubleshooting sessions with members
Design, Testing and Populating M5TC PCBs (Technology Collection) (educational boards)
CMOS logic gates using discrete transistors
Half and Full Adder using CMOS ICs
Dual 8-bit CMOS shift registers (with manual or computer input)
Four-bit rotary encoder (with gray code and straight binary)
Four-bit numbers board with display of binary, hexadecimal and decimal
Alumni and industry talks
It is a great privilege to be the director of M5. It has evolved a great deal since 2008 but we've always kept the focus of augmenting the engineering curriculum to give the students a more complete picture of what it means to be an engineer.
Thank you very much for your support of this innovative ECE makerspace. Let me know when you are visiting UMass and I'd be happy to give you a tour.
Palm trees,
Baird
Baird Soules
Sr. Lecturer
Director of Experiential Learning
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
| Rank | Prize | DEPARTMENT/GROUP/RSO | Donors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $2,000 | Massachusetts Daily Collegian | 218 |
| 2 | $500 | CHAARG | 81 |
| 3 | $500 | Club Water Polo | 68 |
| 4 | Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers | 53 | |
| 5 | Beekeeping Club | 42 |
| Rank | Prize | DEPARTMENT/GROUP/RSO | Donors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $2,000 | SBS in DC | 50 |
| 2 | $500 | Cape Cod Alumni Group Scholarship | 40 |
| 3 | $500 | Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology | 22 |
| 4 | Film Studies | 16 | |
| 5 | Hospitality and Tourism Management Department | 10 |
| Rank | Prize | DEPARTMENT/GROUP/RSO | Donors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $2,000 | Duly Noted | 229 |
| 2 | $500 | Women's Ultimate Frisbee | 165 |
| 3 | $500 | Men's Ultimate Frisbee | 118 |
| 4 | The Boltwood Project | 104 | |
| 5 | Formula SAE Team | 52 |
