We are back in full swing after the New Year break. It’s good to see so much work happening in the shop. It’s also about to get even busier with our new Freshmen group only a few weeks away from being announced. It’s a very exciting time of year!
This week Senior Gabe Araujo was trouble shooting his maze solving robot:
This week I mostly worked on getting the micromouse to run on a set path while staying centered in the cells of the maze, and without hitting any walls. This week I got the micromouse to go all the way in the maze but sometimes it is still getting stuck, in some walls it does not turn and only goes forward which I believe is a problem with the sensors not being set to the right range in the code.
In this code I tried to fix the problem of the micromouse turning too much to one side by make it so that when the middle left, or middle right sensors is triggered, the micromouse corrects its path wither by turning left or right, and trying to be was centered as possible, and if the micromouse gets stuck while trying to be centered, and it is not moving forward, it stops and tries again. While doing this I noticed that the micromouse was moving in an angle, so I tried to make the centering function more smoother by making the motors change speed instead of changing directions when trying to be centered. I could not do that because the micromouse was constantly turning to the left, and the button for stopping the micromouse stopped working .
See more of his robot at his website, linked here.
Junior Kim Dao continues with the large LED Word Clock.
The first blog post of the year! The first thing I worked on for these week was laser cut. I wrote out a plan to what I needed to laser cut first. I first added all of the letter acrylics I had and then figured out how many cuts I would need to make. The wood pieces were the worse because so many would need to be cut out which would be very time consuming. Everyday I hope to attach at least 6 letter blocks onto the board and once I’m done I will progress into completing the whole board. Once at least most of the LEDs are covered me and my friends want to test the code and see if it works and will project letters correctly. Lately this week, many of my classmates need to laser cut as well so some days I would take days off laser cutting and work on potential projects I want to work on as a way to keep myself working during shop time. During this week, I reorganized the discarded wooden pieces and I want to try to reuse them somehow as a way to not waste wood.
Learn more about the word clock at Kim’s website, linked here.
Our Sophomores have begun their own website to document their work over the course of the next few years. Here is an example post from the first assignments.
Sophomore Alex Bress is working on the LED Light Box Project.
This week was the first full week since Winter Vacation. I had done a bit of work last Thursday and Friday finishing code, so I moved on to 3D modeling the box. While modeling, I had a flash of inspiration for the code, so I spent a few days changing that before I moved back to CAD. I finished modeling the box on Thursday and have now moved on to designing the PCB. I will most likely spend the next few weeks making the PCB, and then it should be on to designing the acrylic and fabricating the box based on my models.
See more of Alex’s project here.
MVTHS Engineering 
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