Hard to believe we’ve nearly completed 4 rotations of Freshmen CTE. This year we will have 15 rotations that will end during the second quarter. This will give us a full semester with our new Engineering & Robotics Freshmen class. Very excited to meet them in a few months.
This week we had a lot of exciting projects continuing in our shop, so lets get to them.
Senior Aaron BenDaniel is working on a mini mouse autonomous robot. He says:
This week I finished up putting all of my parts into Fusion and I began designing my Micromouse. I’m only just now appreciating just how small half-scale Micromice are. Each cell is 90mm by 90mm. This means that my micromouse needs to fit inside a 45mm circle, but because I want some tolerance, I’ve decided to squeeze everything into a 40mm circle. The wheel-wells take up quite a bit of space, which leaves barely enough room for everything else.
Finding a battery that stores enough power but can fit in the awkward space has been a challenge.
This is my preliminary schematic of my Micromouse. It’s missing a LiPo charger, but other than that I think it’s good. My PCB will almost certainly need to be double-sided, which we can manufacture in the shop. I might just order them from JLC PCB, as they’re pretty cheap and much higher quality.
I also wrote a super-duper simple version of a PID algorithm, it’s missing the “Integral” and “Derivative” parts, so I guess it’s just a “Proportional” algorithm. It oscillates some, but hopefully it should be good enough.
It’s a very cool looking project, check out his website for videos and photos.
Junior Kim Dao completed one project and began another this week.
My Lightbox Project was all finished and I tested it at home in the dark, the LEDs were very vibrant and were able to display my acrylic. I’m happy that there was no complications with constructing my box electronically and physically.
I like the idea of being able to see the inside of the box with all the components and PCB. It reminds me of a TV. After the completion of my Light Box I decided to work on another project. I realized that I don’t have any proper place to leave my headphones on (I normally leave it on my desk or on my PC). Normally when I get home I have to do homework online so seeing the clutter on my desk paired with the big headphones make me upset. I decided to go with a cactus design to display it and I believed that this would be a great idea because it can really help me improve my skills of Fusion360. For this week I was working on the base of it and the stands where my headphones will rest at. I had to make adjustments to my design such as the height and width of the stand.
Check out Kim’s website to see photos of her projects.
The Sophomores spent time in the machine shop this week, with each student making an aluminum ring on the lathe. They learned how to safely operate a lathe, as well as the basic parts and tools that make up a lathe. Additionally, they continued to work on CAD guides after completing their rings. It was a fun week in the shop, and I know the sophomores are looking forward to more machine shop projects.
That’s all for this week!
MVTHS Engineering 
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