Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 24

MAKING TROUBLE

BY SAUL GRIFFITH

Model It, or Make It Modelable

This summer I had two great interns in my lab. As usual, they taught me more than I taught them. One in particular helped me refine my thoughts on the theme that pervades my every day.

When Geoff first arrived in my office, I described his summer project to him. I had written 2,000 lines of code in MATLAB to model the Ackerman steering geometry of a tilting (leaning) vehicle. He was to take that code, check it, improve it, and finish it, and we’d build the vehicle as a tilting, steering, cargo-carrying tricycle. He said, “It’ll take three days.” I countered, “I’ll bet it takes six weeks.”

Geoff dove into the code. He only looked up from his computer for two reasons: to hear instructions ...