Hello everybody, we hope you had a nice weekend. Here is a quick recap of the work done by students last week in the shop.
Senior Sacha Silvia was finishing up the motorized shade project.
This week was short but I made good progress on the motorized blinds and did a few other small things.
Firstly, I worked on getting the spools attached to the motor rod for the blinds which went sort of well but two of the spools are too loose and will spin if there is any force applied to them. Right now I’m not worried about this because I will likely end up machining spools anyway, these are primarily to test if the idea will actually work. Hot glue will work for now. I also designed spacers for the pillow blocks so that the rod will fit snugly and they will actually work as intended instead of just holding up the rod. I didn’t get around the 3D printing them but there are only four and they’re very small so I will definitely get to it next week.
The next thing I worked on was helping my classmate Reid Pacini work on his lightbox project. Reid had made a lightbox in the past but wanted to make an improved version now that he has further developed his skills. I helped Reid come up with a few ideas about what the LEDs would do and showed him a few different options because I was a little more familiar with programming NeoPixels. We ended up deciding on a light that goes around the box one pixel at a time, which also changes in color from a solid red to a solid yellow, while it does so. Overall it was fun to be back to programming things that I had a familiarity with and I’m glad I was able to help him out.
The last thing I worked on this week was getting the Word Clock set up on the new router. I had forgotten about this until my teacher asked me about it on Thursday and I remembered I had set up the clock to be programmed. I thought that this would be an awfully simple task however I was mistaken. I forgot that Mr. Christy had re-imaged all of the computers in our shop, meaning all of the locally stored files had been erased. This isn’t a huge problem because fortunately, I back up all of my code for my project on GitHub, however, one thing that it caused was for the libraries for NTPClient and ESP_Async_WebServer to be erased from the Arduino IDE.
This proved to be quite annoying as no matter what I did, I wasn’t able to install the libraries in a way where they would work. I tried directly installing and manually installing the libraries through zip extraction but nothing was working. I’ll have to tackle the challenge next week, but for now I’m just confused.
Learn more about this project at his website, linked here.
Junior Matt Stricker has been making a Plinko game.
I started this week by attempting to fix a minor issue that had been occurring where the screw had been falling out of the pipe when the balls fell on it which would slowly push it out of place. I tried to fix this by making a bracket that I could attach to the bottom corner and unscrew if I needed to, however, this didn’t work very well so I have started to design a 3d printed version where it will just attach.
The next thing I did this week was to think about what I wanted to work on for my next practice since I needed a break from my current project after working on it for so long. I want to do something with either a top or trying to keep a wheel/disk spinning for as long as possible. I watched a few videos on ideas for projects, and I created a little prototype that worked pretty well. It spun for a long time without crashing into stuff.
Learn more about this project at Matt’s blog, linked here.
The Sophomore continued their circuitry and coding work with Mr. Christy during the week. Back to learning CAD and Machine Shop next week.
MVTHS Engineering 
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