This week in our Engineering class, students made strong progress as they moved beyond fabrication into integration, testing, and documentation phases of their projects. Below are highlights from two students who shared detailed reflections on their work.
Bella worked on two concurrent projects: the proto-type mount for the power supply/PCB of her word clock, and a set of custom wooden coasters. On Monday, with access to the 3D printer blocked, she focused on cutting and sanding all five coasters in wood to prep them for finishing. On Wednesday she finally used the 3D printer to print the mount, though it didn’t finish in time for class, so she returned to the coasters and applied two coats of finisher to their tops and sides, sanding between coats. On Thursday she checked the finished 3D printed mount, successfully attached the power supply and PCB (her measurements were accurate this time), and then applied the third and final coat of finisher to the tops and sides of the coasters, and began finisher application on their bottoms—planning to finish the remaining layers and take them home on Friday. bhallahan403.wixsite.com
Jonas, on the other hand, dedicated his week to the sensor-driven autonomous vehicle. He borrowed extra time on the lab’s dynamometer to tune the motor controller parameters: by lowering the I-gain slightly and reducing the dead-band in the throttle response, he achieved smoother acceleration curves and eliminated the previous jerky start behavior. He then performed range testing, driving the vehicle across the lab under a fixed path and logging encoder feedback and gyroscope drift. Jonas discovered that the gyroscope drifted by about 0.8° per minute when idling, so he reprogrammed the Kalman filter to include a slow drift compensation term, which brought the drift down to 0.1° per minute. By Friday, the vehicle completed a full loop autonomously with a margin of error under 2 cm. Jonas’ Blog
Sophomore students continued their CAD and hand drafting lessons with Mr. Lewkowitz
MVTHS Engineering 
You must be logged in to post a comment.