A small, everyday problem
At Harvey Mudd College, plenty of students rode skateboards to class and left them unattended at campus racks. Our MuddHacks team wanted to make it just as easy to leave a board there, with a little more confidence that it would still be there afterward.
MuddHacks gave us twelve hours to design, build, and get a device working. We spent ours on TapLok: a lock you could operate with the campus ID card you already carried.
Tap, lock, and go
We built a solenoid-based lock attachment for the existing racks and integrated it with the college’s tap-card system. A student could use their HMC ID to lock or unlock a skateboard.
The aim was to add only a few seconds to putting a board away. Tap your card, secure the board, and get to class.
Figure 2. The TapLok team: Dillon Coville, Kaveh Pezeshki, Erik Meike, Natalie Krieger, Hunter Whaples, Sophie Yu, and Nathan Sunbury.
From idea to prototype
The twelve-hour build brought machining, programming, and product development together in one project. TapLok won first place at MuddHacks in 2018.
This was a team build; the account here draws on our original team project description.