Seniors enjoyed C3 day on Wednesday of the week. This day allows seniors to visit colleges and learn about careers in preparation for leaving high school. In addition, we met with a drone company about how to implement drone technology and certification into the curriculum. As always, our students were working diligently on a variety of projects.

This week our Student Spotlight highlights Senior Ben Smith ’27

Here is Ben’s recent Blog Post:

ESP32 AND SCHEMATIC

This week I started to work on the new PCB. To start I needed to add the ESP32, led, and a ON/OFF switch to the old schematic. I looked around for a ESP32 WROOM schematic that matched the model I had, but no matter what I looked up on Google or Fusion, I couldn’t find it. I decided that it wasn’t too complicated, so I designed it myself. I measured the lengths using the breadboard pins it sat in, and (in theory) it is the correct footprint size. I also modeled the schematic exactly how it is shown online just because it was the easiest to not make a mistake when connecting the schematic pins to the footprint pins.

I then just needed to add it to the existing schematic. I also decided to make a new copy of the old schematic to work on, so I could reference back to the original, as well as have a fail safe if this one does not work.

I added three new components: an on/off switch pin header (left), the ESP32 (middle), and the LED to check if the Xbox controller is connected (right). I kept the same layout as before, but instead of using the I2C connector, the ESP32 and Pi Pico would have direct connections to their SDA and SCL pins. Here is the full schematic: (you can tell I was a beginner when I started this project)

FOOTPRINT

Now all I had to do was make the footprint of the new board. I also decided to start from scratch as my old board was much bigger than it had to be. There were some other things I aimed to fix about this new board that were different from the first board. I wanted to make a ground plane first and that connected all the grounds and not some of them (this was actually a schematic issue that I fixed). I also wanted to have filleted corners, that was pretty simple. I wanted the components to be more compact, and I wanted the silkscreen layer to have more information. This was all pretty simple and I remembered how to do MOST of them, the others I needed a quick reminder from Mr. Christy for.

I then pushed it to the 3D model to make the eventual screw holes. The new design is on the left and the old one on the right. As you can see, the old one wasn’t very organized of optimized.

PROJECT POSTS

The final thing I did this week was added a new Project Post for the steam engine, and started working on the robotic arm post. I cleaned up the page they were on as well:

That concluded this week. Hopefully I will have a PCB to solder next week, and I can work on finally finishing this project.

See more of Ben’s work here.