My first (in my opinion) real project was Engineering Design Challenge #2, the robotic arm challenge. My group and I chose to base our design off of those wooden snake toys that pinch your fingers. When pulled, the strings will force the arm to turn to the left or the right.the one seen in the centre pulls it up. More pictures in the gallery!
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Grade 11 Mechatronics is here! I'm going to continue documenting my experiences in my final year in the academy. The rapid-fire challenge is coming up fast, so stay tuned for more.
This challenge was a short and sweet one, where we solved an everyday problem with a robot. We folded clothes. It ended up being a bit of a bear trap, but we think it's fine. My passion project is, to sum it up, a drone that you can tear down and put back together. I did a talk on it a few weeks ago. I call it Rails, for the parts that hold it together. It runs on Arduino and uses a variety of sensors to detect changes in hardware and its place in the environment. The dream is to make it amphibious with a modular part to make it so. That modular component is what makes this device so unique. You can make it whatever you need it to be, whether that's a toy or an enterprise level tool. We had several issues - cost to manufacture, hardware limitations and issues within the group. I'm very proud of what we have, and what I've learned while doing it. It's in a prototype state right now, as we're testing different chassis designs. It isn't in a flying state (yet) but it will be, very soon. I'm looking forward to showing it off when it's complete and I promise you, it won't be disappointing. This is my Rocky Talk that I did on the subject. Yes, I know I need a haircut. Minefield was one of our longer projects, and it's one that I'm proud of. For a bit of background knowledge, Minefield is a game in which the Contenders grab balls from on top of pylons and dump them into buckets. There are tall and short buckets. Tall ones are worth 40 points in autonomous, 20 in manual. Short ones are 20 in autonomous, 10 in manual. So far, we're sitting at 60 points overall which places us in third place. Our build was interesting, as the robot also had to be able to complete tasks for the competitive team. Because of the differences in the tasks, we had to be able to switch parts quickly. The whole arm assembly can now be removed with only four screws, making switching easy. Pictures in gallery! Video of competition below. Note that this isn't my group. I recently became a part of WHC's competitive robotics team and so far it's been a blast. Our recent scrimmage on May 5th was an exciting endeavor. We lost miserably, but it was impressive when you kept in mind that we only had one month to design something against people who had months, even years.
The team has had a big impact on how I see my school and my school spirit, because before then I had never joined any teams or clubs. I feel like I'm a part of my school now, not just a student. Photos in gallery! We started working on a project called the smart house a while back, and it's proven itself to be particularly difficult for me. I've learned a lot about Arduino programming in the past few days, and as an extension, C++ (Smart goal!). So far I'm very proud of my programming aspect. I felt our design needed work, but I can't change that now. Check out the gallery for some more pictures. Keep in mind that they'll be up the morning after I write this, because my group presenting our project tomorrow. This is a snippet of the code I worked on. It's showing some of the modules I made in it. The lines of text with two slashes indicate comments.
Today, I'm going to tell you about my goals for this year. Since last year I've been thinking about it, and now with the tools at my disposal I am going to learn how to code in C++.
The first step is learning to write with Arduino's tools, as it is similar to C++ in many ways. This will happen throughout the first semester. Then I start taking courses for extra structured programming and credit. This will happen over the course of the school year. At this point, I continue practicing and using the skill, writing code to do miscellaneous things. This happens beyond the school year. With this plan, I should be able to achieve my goal of successfully understanding C++. Yesterday, we presented and finished our second design challenge. The challenge was about building a piece of furniture out of recyclable materials, and for a bonus we would integrate Arduino. Our chair had a design consisting of three hexagons attached together. They were made up of six triangles, and three of those were filled with newspaper. We then covered the whole thing in a cardboard sheath and painted it gold. Our arduino powered a servo attached to a cupholder. When all added together it made a cupholder that slid out by turning a knob. More pictures in the gallery!
About a week back, we heard from a man named Paul Davis about internet safety, and the illusion of privacy on the web. I learned about how everything we do is catalogued, and how our phones track every movement we make. Creepy. In any case, I found it to be a bit uninteresting, but informative nonetheless.
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AuthorRamon Rojas, Eleventh Grader Archives
September 2018
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