The Sophomores finished their LED Lightbox Project. Per tradition, each of our Juniors and Seniors walked around the shop and spent time with each Sophomore and their lightbox, looking at the CAD, Code, and the physical object itself. Each upperclassmen then gave the student a ‘grade’. It’s a great time for everybody, and allows the sophomores to learn from the juniors and seniors about what they did well, and what they could improve on their project.
This week Senior tested the routing capabilities of our PCB mill:
This week went at a good pace. I started off by testing a piece of test material for the Bantam Tools Milling Project, just to see if our Desktop Mill was able to cut it well, before using aluminum.
Using an 1/8th End Mill, it cut through well, without any sort of error or material breakage. The pocket was cut out without any sort of cracking or missing chunks.
This was all thanks to the Bantam Tools Fusion 360 Guide, which did not just go over gcode and toolpaths, but CAM itself. The guide covered most of the basics, shown below.
After a successful test, it was time to face down the material in the Trax Mill.
Using a 3 tooth flycutter, I am facing down a piece of aluminum into a 3X3X.3 square.
See you next week
Learn more about Will’s process at his website, linked here.
Junior Euan Rees has finished his electric dishwasher and is looking for a new project:
This week a continued to brainstorm and research ideas for the project I am working on. At first I was interested in the idea of creating some form of remote control submarine, however due to a few reasons it was not the best option. This was mainly due to the fact that It would be very hard to try and test the submarine inside of the shop, with no real way of driving it around in the water. After this idea, I next spent some time continuing to research ideas online of different remote control projects. Finally after more research I came across the idea of creating some form of multi-terrain rover, which I would be able to drive across man rough surfaces. One of the inspirations for this idea was the mars rovers, as I think it has many aspects of what I want to try to build.
After figuring this part out I spent my next section of the week beginning to learn how to use remote control. Firstly, I spent some time researching different types of remote control systems, eventually I landed on the nRF24L01 which was a specific remote controller the we happened to have in the shop. After finding this I have began the process of wiring the receiver and transmitter after watching some informative videos. I was able to learn far more about how to use this tech and overall helped me to begin wiring it correctly. I hope to continue to wiring the nRF24L01 and that I will be able to start more of the code tomorrow.
Follow Euan on his new project at his website, linked here.
Our freshmen continue to work hard on our guides, and moved fast through many circuitry tutorials last week.
MVTHS Engineering 
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