Lessons in Gonzo Engineering from Breakthrough Winners

One of them shot at the moon and discovered water, another invented a light-giving soccer ball called s0ccket, the third created a bacteria-detecting cell phone, and another programs magnets to do his bidding. They created all this on a tight budget—relying on much off-the-shelf engineering. Here are some lessons the panelists took while pursuing their projects, by embracing their limitations…and having an ebay account.

By Olivia Koski
engineering breakthrough panel
October 5, 2010 5:58 PM Text Size: A . A . A

Lesson 1: Be Optimistic

Harvard graduate Jessica Matthews understands the spirit of hacking hardware together on a budget—not the $80 million dollars her co-panelist Daniel Andrews of NASA had to deal with, but a student-sized budget. In a dim dorm room with Britney Spears blasting, everything was game as she and her classmates cobbled together tape, salt and pepper shakers, and scraped together leftover wires from the engineering building to create their first prototype. It might not have been pretty, but it rolled, it bounced and it powered an LED.

Their secret? A lack of formal training in engineering. "We were utterly optimistic, ready to keep fighting through. We didn't know the limitations because we weren't trained in what they were," Matthews says. They hope that their example shows kids the art of what's possible when they start to look at their environment differently. When in doubt, be optimistic. Take it from Macguyver: you will figure a way out of the ship's cargo hold by fashioning a jetpack from seatbelts and a steering wheel.

Lesson 2: Be Willing to Cheat and Steal

It's hard to think of an engineering task further from how to make a soccer ball give off light than a mission to the moon. But Daniel Andrews of NASA's LCROSS Mission relates to the S0ccket team's approach to a problem. Here's what he learned from the master: "We cheated," he says. In competition with 19 other different agencies, Andrews and his team were up against a 1000-kg weight limit—including fuel. So they decided to do what no one else had thought of—use a part of the spacecraft normally reserved for secondary launches and support equipment. It usually becomes space junk, but their insight into the junk's usefulness increased their payload restriction from 1000 kg to 3000 instantly. "We got it for free," Andrews says.

Another cheat? They borrowed an IR camera normally used under the hood of NASCAR vehicles to monitor engine block temperatures. It was a perfect adaption for space because of its already proven ability to take extreme vibrations. Other technologies they took include imaging techniques used by carpet recycling firms and an imager that brewers use to analyze the chemical contents for that perfect beer.

Lesson 3: Throw Away What You Don't Need

We all know cell phones aren't just for calling anymore. It's not even that hard to imagine how a cellphone could be repurposed into a microscope. But the process that Aydogan Ozcan used involved throwing away the lenses. The technique relies on the ubiquity of cheap electronics—enabled by your child's addiction to high definition video games. Instead of using lenses to magnify the microscopic, Ozcan and his team tried to see if they could detect the shadow of a cell and get information from that. That's right, a shadow. They used a webcam from ebay and were actually able to easily see microshadows. Surprisingly, these shadows contain more information than even your average microscope image. This means they can see parasites in water—with a cell phone. The trick is that the hardware is cheap, and it enables access to powerful software on other platforms that can decode the rich data contained in the shadow.

Lesson 4: Embrace Your Impatience

Want something now? Order it off ebay. Why reinvent the wheel? A breakthrough moment came for Larry Fullerton when he had a new idea for how to improve a generator design, but knew that the type of stator he would need would be time consuming to spec out and difficult to fabricate because of its unique shape and size. He didn't want to wait around to get the thing fabricated, so he consulted eBay. He found some audio transformers that were $1 a piece, tore out the cores, took his dremel to them, and ground them to the shape he needed for a prototype.

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