23-24 Week of 5/13 – 5/17

The warmer weather is truly upon us, and it was a great time to have the shop garage door open while we worked this week. A little fresh air is good for the soul as we enter the last few week of school.

This week Junior Alex Hickey was working on some interesting electronics and hardware. He writes about it on his website:

This week I spent some time in cad designing a phone holder that mounts to dashboard of my car. I lost a good amount of progress because my recent changes on fusion were not saved and were lost. This week I also finalized switching to raspbian OS. I installed and moved my libraries and dependencies as well as recreating my dataset folder that stores known faces. I went through most of the code and still am stuck on changing the frame rate of the window, which runs at an impressive 2 fps. There are a couple files that the main code needs to run and Ive been looking for a spot in the code that determiens the frame rate. I did have a line that mentions fps but after changing it nothing was different. Going forward I will keep trying to fix this issue.

See photos of his project on his website at this link.

Senior Nate Hopper has nearly finished his chessboard. It’s been a long process, but he’s put a lot of had work into it. He discusses he recent progress on his website:

This is my second to last blog post on this site. The weekly blog will come to an end next week. Let’s jump into it. My chessboard is almost done. I got the circuit boards working last week. It was a good chunk of troubleshooting but I didn’t have to fix the broken boards! Three boards survived the Great Fry, and since I had 5 functioning boards, I just used all 8 boards I had and with some work and code I managed to get the boards to work together with no errors!

Along with this, I’ve finally cut the whole board out of wood! I had to split the top piece and bottom piece in half, so I could get them cut properly. I’m so happy with how it came out, and I can’t believe I managed to finish this behemoth of a project.

See more photos of the chessboard on his website at this link.

Next week the sophomore will battle it out with their Sumobots. The contest is scheduled for Thursday (5/23). We hope to have a recording of it so we can share with all of you.

The Freshmen worked on more circuitry with Mr. Christy. They are truly moving fast through the guides and are learning a lot. It’s great to have this new group in our shop!