Brandeis Design and Innovation

Clubs

BDI currently hosts Aviation Club, Deishacks, Robotics Club, Hack Club, and Deis3D in our spaces.

Using the arrows on the right, scroll through our different club collaborators and learn about about their innovative projects!

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Deis Robotics has had an exciting fall semester! With meetings 2-3 times a week in the Automation Lab, this school year kicked off with a series of e-board led training, covering computer aided design (CAD), 3D printing, and soldering, to give new students the fundamental skills required for most projects. Club members have been working on a variety of projects, from making their own speakers to combat robotics. Over this semester, club members competed in five local/out of state competitions. We took home two 3rd place trophies at MIT House Battle, 2nd place at RCExcitement November Ants 2025, and even the "Most Fun Robot" award at National Havoc Robotics League (NHRL) World Championships in December. We also hosted our own internal 1lb 3D printed robot competition with hopes of running an event that is open to the public later in the school year. Currently, we have organized a group of around 10 members, many of whom are new builders, to design and prepare robots to compete in NHRL in March 2026.
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DeisHacks is Brandeis’ 48-hour Hackathon for Social Good sponsored by the Brandeis School of Business and Economics. During the event, student teams partner with nonprofit organizations to tackle real challenges facing our community. Teams compete for cash prizes and develop projects (“hacks”) that nonprofits can put into action to strengthen their impact and reach. If you’d like to explore some of our past winning projects, you can find examples on our website. Importantly, you do not need to be a computer science student–or even build a technical project–to participate or win. DeisHacks is truly a hackathon for everyone, we offer dedicated categories for non-technical hacks, and many of our partner nonprofits are looking for creative, strategic, or design-focused solutions just as much as technical ones. This year’s DeisHacks event will take place January 30 - February 1, 2026, in Farber Library. You’re welcome to register with your own team or join one at the event–we’ll also be hosting activities to help participants meet one another and form teams. This semester, our organizing team has been working hard building up a portfolio with a marketing plan to engage as many students as possible for this event. Deishacks, along with Brandeis School of Business and Economics have collaborated with on-campus clubs like Girls Who Code and Brandeis Design and Innovation to promote the event. Looking forward, until January 30th we will be tabling at locations around campus, networking on and off campus, and working to make this event memorable for the Brandeis community and beneficial to our Waltham neighbors.
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Brandeis Aviation Club offers unparalleled opportunities for students interested in exploring flight and aviation-related topics. Through its partnership with East Coast Aero Club, the club provides members with hands-on experience through flight lessons, specifically in Piper Cherokees and Cessna 172N Skyhawks. On campus, the club deepened its collaboration with the MakerLab’s Digital Scholarship Lab, hosting an interactive drone workshop led by Ian Roy and Tim Herbert that introduced students into the process of obtaining their UAV remote pilot license. The club also recently welcomed guest speaker Aaron Louison, a longtime Brandeis staff member and licensed private pilot, who shared insights from his journey toward earning his Private Pilot License (PPL). Alongside flight-simulation and aviation fundamentals sessions, Brandeis Aviation Club continues to expand hands-on opportunities for students interested in flying, aerospace, innovation, and beyond.  

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Deis3D works with 3D printers and has weekly meetings where they discover a range of topics varying from the latest software tool sets in Computer Assisted Design to the newest hardware and its novel approach to 3D printing. Each year the club makes a list of the newest 3D printers they want to purchase and any hardware upgrades they would like to install on older models, chasing the edge of 3D printing technology. They use this technology not only to push the edge of what is possible in the MakerLab, but also to support projects from other groups across campus.

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The Hack Club uses BDI's High Performance Workstation (nicknamed TI-89000). This is a Dell workstation equipped with three discrete NVIDIA GPUs, located in the DS Lab. Hack Club uses TI-89000 as a shared on-prem compute resource. 

Hack Club member Alex Ott writes:

"I used the system to run local LLMs via LM Studio, exposing the models both through the LM Studio desktop interface and remotely through OpenWebUI on the university network. Most experimentation focused on running gpt-oss-120b, which is impractical to run efficiently on typical consumer hardware. Using LM Studio’s OpenAI-compatible API, I built custom tooling that integrated the local models into AI-assisted software development workflows, enabling tasks such as summarization, information extraction, and revision over sensitive material without sending data to third-party services. These experiments informed the development of a workshop and written guide introducing LLM fundamentals and practical, privacy-preserving and academic use cases. In addition, I collaborated with another student who used the same system to develop and train a stock prediction model, gaining hands-on experience with the constraints and workflow considerations of developing on a multi-GPU machine."

Is your club interested in working with BDI? Check out our Club Collaborations page to learn more.