Week 2/9 - 2/13

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 the block.

During the middle of the week, I needed something to do as the part I ordered for the R2 hadn't come in yet. Mr. L suggested I finish the part he had started making on the lathe for another teacher. The part had three different-sized diameters and then one big hole in the middle. Since the stock was already the biggest diameter of 50 mm, I started with the next biggest diameter of 46 mm. Most of the turning was pretty simple as it was just getting things down to size,

Making the hole turned out to be problematic. I started off by using a center drill to get the center and then 1/4, 3/8, and 1/2 inch drill bits to make the hole bigger so a boring tool could go in. The issue is that none of the boring tools would work. The first one we tried had an issue where the base of it was wider than the bit itself, so when going into the hole, the material would hit the base. The second solution was a different tool, which wasn't long enough, so it also didn't work. Mr. L had to go back to the original tool, but this time I used the mill to take off the edge on the tool. This still wasn't working, though, so a different solution will have to be found.

The switch I ordered arrived in the middle of the week, so I spent some time on that. I continued my work on the R2 project by integrating the switch I received into the existing breadboard setup. I also updated my code to include the servo for the head movement. However, I faced some unexpected challenges in getting the switch operational, which took more time than I anticipated. I plan to focus on resolving these issues in the week after break.

On Thursday, I additionally helped Tim with updating Ben's lightbox project. For English class, we have a group doing a project on Hamlet, but we turned it into Star Wars. Since Ben had made a lightsaber for his lightbox, we decided that it would be good for filming. The problem was that it wasn't portable and needed to be adjusted to have batteries, along with some other things that can be seen in Tim's blog post here.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/de1db5_f73e7caff5d74d9e810723383684836d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4