The EECS undergraduate culture at Berkeley sure is...interesting. Being in the Bay means a feast of not just big companies in Silicon Valley, but also hip start-ups in San Francisco. If you don't have your summer internship offer signed by November, you're clearly a failure*. We are direct feeder into the gentry.
To fully immerse yourself in the context of this project, take a minute to visit berkeleyeecs.com. Keep it open in another tab, and come back when you're ready.
If that wasn't clear enough, check out these comments on a thread of my favorite website, Reddit dot com, referring to /r/eecs:
Just like the Bay's "hella", EECS majors have developed their own lingo. EECS master race (preferably typed with a hashtag in all caps, like so: #EECSMASTERRACE) has, like transistors, spiked in such popularity, it's even prompted faculty responses:
Another favorite phrase, and what I have decided to create as a token of my time here, is
EECS Circlejerk (noun): a collection of EECS majors talking about EECS things, usually about how great EECS is.
I wanted to capture this phrase in a less vulgar fashion, so I opted for a movable EECS on a keychain-like circle. Also, as someone who really enjoys doing research in fabrication, I couldn't let myself slide with a stagnant 3D print.
After some searching, I found that the official EECS logo uses a font called Berkeley Oldstyle, a custom variation of University Oldstyle.
I used Blender for modeling since I needed kerning. I got lazy and, instead of trying to develop a support structure for moving the EECS text, I made one big EECS intended to rotate along its own axis. I printed this on a Makerbot in Jacobs.
Sadly, I forgot that extrusion layers are only like .5mm thick, and did not leave enough space for the hole on the letters. Thus the EECS doesn't actually rotate or move.
On my return flight from a HCI conference in Charlotte, NC, I decided that I shouldn't be lazy and actually 3D model my original plan. Instead of making a support structure, I realized I could just take the difference of a larger ring and the text, as above. I made sure to make the subtractive ring bigger this time around.
I printed this result on the Printerbots in the Invention Lab. However, I forgot about the support material! So the floating key ring didn't turn out very well, but it did remind me of a paper about 3D printed hair I saw at the conference.
Finally, after my pal Tomás suggested using a platform support instead of a brim, the small movable EECS finally came to life:
Because the small movable EECS had a lot of whitespace, though, I decided to combine my first immovable print with the second movable one for the ultimate EECS keychain.
Here is a gif of me demonstrating the little EECS circling around the big EECS:
And here's the whole thing on my (new, since someone threw up on my old one on BART) backpack, chilling with my other accoutrements:
STL Files
Footnotes
* You think I'm kidding, but a lot of my friends legitimately feel terrible about this.
(I'm sorry if the term "circlejerk" offends. It's supposed to, I think. Because that's #eecs.)
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