Note: Workshops are held on Mondays unless otherwise noted in the schedule below. Below is this semester’s schedule, with dates and short descriptions. Absolutely no experience is required, and all students are welcome. Please sign up!

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This Semester's Schedule (Fall 2026)

Miss a workshop? We'll likely run it again next semester. Check back here for updates!

Note that the October 15th workshop is being held in 503 Hayden Hall! ## Workshop Descriptions

Tape Measure Yagi Antenna (Introduction to Amateur "Ham" Radio)

Build a working directional antenna from PVC, tape measures, and coax! Learn the basics of radio waves, antenna design, propagation patterns, and how to use your creation to make real on-air contacts. This serves as an excellent introduction to amateur radio and antenna design.

Schematic Capture

Turn your ideas into circuits with KiCad! Learn how to draw a complete schematic, the first step in creating your own printed circuit board (PCB). This workshop begins our series on PCB development. You will leave the workshop having drawn a pre-engineered schematic for use in the PCB Design workshop.

SPICE Circuit Simulation (LTspice)

Before solder touches a board, test it in software. Using your schematic from the previous workshop, simulate and analyze your circuit in a free SPICE-based circuit simulator, LTspice, to predict performance.

PCB Design (KiCad)

This workshop will take you through the process of designing a printed circuit board. You'll learn about the different types of component footprints, layers, routing, traces and more! No previous workshop attendance is needed.

Introduction to Soldering (Through-hole)

Learn an essential electrical engineering skill: soldering! We provide all of the tools, materials, and a custom instructional circuit that you will assemble and test! Uses the much easier to solder "through hole" components. Go home with a working Schmitt Trigger Oscillator!

Advanced Soldering (Surface-mount)

While through hole components may be good enough for hobby projects, most modern devices use SMD aka "surface-mount device" components. You will once again build a custom circuit, this time with SMD components!

Bass Booster

Learn a little about analog audio! Build a small transistor-based frequency selective amplifier to test on whatever audio signals you feed it! Bring a device with a headphone jack!

Tesla Coils

Build the simplest version of a Tesla Coil! Powerful enough to light florescent bulbs, simple enough to understand each component in an hour. Learn a little about power circuity, resonators, transformers, and high voltage arc formation! Everyone goes home with a Tesla Coil! Strong magnetic fields can be harmful to electronic implants

Embedded Development

Embedded devices are everywhere today. You may be familiar with Arduino, but in this workshop, learn bare-metal register manipulation for high speed designs and optimized control over your every bit in your microcontroller! No experience required.

Radio Transmitters (Bring Soldering Knowledge)

Learn the ground-truth basics of why we use high frequency electromagnetic waves for communication, from a purely intuition-based perspective. Solder a simple through-hole AM radio for the VHF band which can be received by any VHF radio/handheld! Extremely easy soldering must be done in this workshop, so attend an "Intro to Soldering" or learn how to solder through hole components before coming!

Past Workshops and Schedules

Below is a selection of workshop presentations and semester schedules from previous years.

Use the accordions below to browse past semesters and explore what we’ve covered.