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At the start of this week, I continued my work on milling plastic blocks for one of the teachers in our school. I found out these were being used to make a sitaar which I thought was pretty cool. The teacher wanted me to start by making just one of the blocks with the PEEK plastic because he didn't know if the design would work, and wanted to test with the Delrin first. Since I already had the programs in the machine, doing this was a lot easier as I really only had to face

It was another shortened week due to the massive amounts of snow we got causing school to close both Monday and Tuesday. Since the part I needed to continue the PCBs and adjust the code for R2 has not come in yet I decided to take on a side project from Mr. L. One of the EL teachers needed some parts made for (I think) a musical instrument. These were to be milled out both Delrin and PEEK plastic. I started off by making a sort of prototype that wasn't perfectly measured jus

It was a shorter week because it started out with MLK day and then we had a professional development day where students don't have school. Even with the short week, I still got a lot done. I started by continuing to try to get the radio receivers to work. I did some troubleshooting involving switching out wires and soldering a new receiver, but something still wasn't working. I then thought that it wasn't necessarily the receiver or wiring that was wrong. I switched the rece

With the completion of the steam engine last week I go back to work trying to fix the RC R2D2. On Monday, I started by trying to just run a test code to make sure the wi-fi modules I was using were working correctly. Towards the end of the day I was trying to install the libraries for the wi-fi module Arduino crashed so I ended it there. Then on Tuesday, my classmate Tim asked me to help him make a part on the mill to potentially fix the problem of a failed resin print. Anot

It has been a while since my last blog post in November. This was due to an unfortunate streak of multiple different illnesses and then there was winter break. All the work that I did over those weeks I am going to try and cover in my next blog post so that one might be longer than normal. Continuing with the steam engine project, Ben and I made the final two pieces which were the crank shaft and crank pin and those were pretty easy considering some of the failures on other

This week Ben and I started by creating the cylinder on the mill. Although originally this was supposed to be turned on the lathe Mr. L thought it would be easier to just use the mill instead. The cylinder involves one big hole which is where the piston goes and then two smaller holes. One of these will get tapped and the other one will go straight through into the bigger holes to let air from the piston out through the upright. We were very focused when doing this so I didn'

This week turned into a wide mix of projects. Ben and I started the week by finishing up the details for the trebuchet. I still needed to find another set of bearings for one of the axles. The sizes were weird for the size hole we wanted, but I found one that didn't have a giant OD and is just a little bit too thick, which won't impact much, fortunately. Fusion makes it very annoying for two people to work on one thing at the same time, even when just making drawings. For th

It's been a very short week, as I was sick on Monday and we didn't have school on Tuesday because of election day. When I finally came back on Wednesday, I found it we were collaborating with metal fab instead of competing. We are going to keep our design but make it out of metal. Ben and I got to work scaling up parts. I worked on remaking the counterweight arms. To do this I took a screenshot of the original and then made a spline and then extruded it, scaling it up and cha

On Friday of last week a few students from our metal fabrication shop at the school challenged us to make a trebuchet within a month that could beat theirs. Since Ben and I had just finished modeling the steam engine, we decided to take a break and do the challenge. The first part involved researching trebuchets and what type we would make. The end result was the whipper trebuchet (shown below) that could theoretically launch tennis balls over 100 mph. Once finished modeli

This week, my fellow classmate, Ben, and I worked on modeling an oscillating steam engine that we are going to mill next week. This is from a kit that our teacher, Mr. L, ordered for the shop. As shown below is the drawing for the assembly of the steam engine. In the top right is the list of materials needed and what part each one is used for. Steam Engine Assembly Drawing We decided to equally split the modeling between the two of us and then combine ours at the end to asse

This week was very short for me since I was not in school on Monday or Tuesday. When I got to robotics on Wednesday, I got right to work on the milling process. The first step was facing down to one inch. This was a pretty easy task that just took a couple of inputs to put in the mill. The next was one of the biggest operations, which was the adaptive toolpath. This would be used to cut out the pockets. The other job was to finish all edges and corners to make them all smoot

This week in Robotics, Mr. L had me steer away from the course to mill a separate part that he normally uses to teach students on the...

For the start of this week I edited and changed some things about my pass-through fidgets. The cone had originally not worked because I...

On Monday, I spent most of the time doing a task for Mr. L. He wanted me to enter his answers into the pre-test again to make sure he had...

Most of my week was taken up by finishing the lamp on the lathe. The piece that I had made last week didn't end up working as the socket...