22-23 Week of 4/24 – 4/28

This week the Freshmen were working in the Machine Shop using hand tools to make a thread gauge. The project gives them a chance to work with metal, and an understanding of how to fabricate metal parts without any CNC help. The thread gauge will allow them to check the most commonly used thread types here in the shop. Please see the photos below of the freshmen in action in the shop.

The Sophomores have been given a 3 weeks to update and refine their sumobots for a second competition. The teams are working through the issues they had during the initial competition, and using the knowledge gained to improve their bots.

Senior Prince Altidor made some significant gains in his Greenhouse project. He wrote on his blog:

This week was kind of all over the place but I got one of my biggest set backs completed

I never was able to have the lcd work but after numerous code it worked finally

I only have to cut out my parts and assemble and a little more code and I should be done

I also helped Clark with some stoplight things.

See some photos from the project here.

Junior Nate Hopper was able to solder his professionally made PCB. On his blog he says:

This week starts off on not such a great note, as I soldered the 50 pin connector onto my circuit board, and it didn’t work when I tested the motor driver. As it turns out, the wiring in the board is completely reversed, and the 50 pins are backwards.

Even worse, I couldn’t get the 50 pin connector out of the board to test the theory my classmates posed that soldering the connector onto the other side of the board would fix my problem, so I had to do some inventive problem solving.

I soldered some pin headers onto the 2 pins I needed to test and onto the two I needed to move the signal to.

And to my complete surprise, it worked. It actually worked.

To be honest, it was a complete act of desperation, and I didn’t think it would actually work, but this does prove the theory that the 50 pin connector is opposite to how it should be.

Along with all the testing of the circuit board, I made a new lid for our shop’s sand blaster.

Some foam needs to be ordered to go between it and the rim of the sand blaster, so for now it’s still not operational, but I’m super proud of how the cut came out.

Some photos and videos of this can be found on his website.