It’s already May! This year is flying past. This week in Engineering class, students worked diligently on their projects, applying technical knowledge, creative thinking, and collaborative problem-solving. Each student focused on different stages of their designs, ranging from component assembly and 3D modeling to PCB fabrication and system testing. Here’s a look at the work completed across three of our classmates’ blogs.
Senior Alex Hickey dedicated this week to 3D modeling and iterative hardware development for his robot. He redesigned and reprinted the robot’s wheel hub multiple times, fine-tuning it to fit perfectly with the drive shaft. Alex also began wiring the Metro Mini microcontroller and preparing the motor driver connections. He’s been documenting his process carefully and aims to begin testing movement functions early next week. See more of Alex’s work here.
Junior Jaspreet Kaur focused her time on learning a light switch cover:
This week I began a new project: designing a light switch plate cover. In my room, I don’t have much decoration on my walls yet. I figured a good place to start would be by customizing the light switch plate on my wall which right now, is very basic and boring. On Monday I looked around for some inspiration on a design that I would like to include on the switch plate. I wanted something that had some texture and raised designs on the plate like the examples below.
I began to design the plate that I wanted in my room with a sun surrounding the light switch. I created the design I started with below by importing a canvas into CAD and tracing the edges of the design. I found that this design would not work well with what I wanted to accomplish with the plate. The spaces between the sun’s rays on the design would not cover the space it needs to on my wall and the light switch would still be somewhat visible. I also found that the plate could not be flat against the wall because when I checked my light switches at home, they were raised above the flat surface of the wall so it would not sit flush against the wall as I could not make it convex and maintain the design effectively.
Since this design had so many issues associated with it, I decided it would be best to scrap the idea and try again with a new design of the plate. This design would keep the form of the classic light switch plate but would include the raised designs that I looked to add to the plate. The plate would have a sun, moon, and some stars on the cover which would be raised above the flat cover. I have not finished the design for this plate yet but I plan on finishing the design on Friday and printing it out the following week.
See more of Jaspreet’s work here.
Sophomore Adam Sayres spent the week making strong progress on his robotics project. After losing his original code for the robot’s distance sensor over break, he and his partner, Alex Bress, decided to move forward without it—proving it wasn’t essential to their robot’s functionality. They successfully mounted the battery holder to a newly designed solid base and milled the custom printed circuit board (PCB), which Adam then soldered and tested. The chassis and wiring are nearly complete, and they plan to finish the top frame next week. See more of Adam’s work here.
This week the Freshmen finished up their waterjet name plaques and learned how to interpret technical drawings. They then used the drawings to create CAD files.
Well, that’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
MVTHS Engineering 
You must be logged in to post a comment.