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Camp Mustang

Today I needed to work on a lasercut project for the Camp Mustang that will be happening next week at the high school. Camp Mustang is a 2 day in school event for elementary and secondary school students within the Medford school district. I will be offering students CAD lessons, lasercutting, and some basic electronics. Several years ago, at my previous teaching job, I created a lasercut bug that could be assembled and then an LED and battery press fit into it so it lit up. I’ve created something similar for students but more of a robot shape. I’m still waiting on some material to cut each one out on, hoping that arrives today – otherwise I will be rushing around next week to get these cut for the students to assemble. For now, you can see the image that is used to lasercut on our Epilog Fusion Pro lasercutter.

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Stop Light

The Stop Light project continues with Junior Clark B. ’23 working fastidiously each day. Clark had the code working on a breadboard, and has spent time using Eagle to create a custom PCB on our Bantam Tools PCB mill. The process of learning how to create a pcb in a CAD/CAM software such as Eagle is very difficult, so kudos to Clark for working through it. As we have found, however, the first attempt at creating a board is usually not the final board – as it tends to take a few efforts before the final working prototype is complete.

When the pcb was coupled together with the relay for high voltage and the light, everything turns on, just now exactly when we want it to. There is probably an error in the code, so Clark needs to spend some time debugging. Still, it’s very close to working properly, ie. following our school schedule, and we have found a stand for it, having repurposed a rolling TV stand that was being thrown away by the Media Tech shop. Hopefully we will be able to present the final version soon. A few in process photos below.

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WaterJet

Today one of my senior students, Myles, began cutting a 5 piece metal sign on the waterjet. Myles has taken it upon himself to become an expert in operating our OMAX waterjet. The machine is a bit old, and has some hiccups from time to time, but he has learned how to make it work consistently, and he is getting really good results from his cuts. It’s great to see him excel in working with this machine, and to see him understand the workflow of drawing his designs into CAD, and bringing them over to the OMAX software and setting up the CAM files for cutting. It’s been a long learning process, but he has really learned a lot. A few photos and video of him below operating the machine today.

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Scanner Pro

Of all the apps on my phone that I put down my hard earned money for, ScannerPro has got to be the best bang for your buck. The ability to scan documents, save them as PDFs, send them to your Google Drive, email them, edit them – it’s such a helpful app. I say this because today I needed to create a site plan for the Health Assisting teachers, and on my way to the facilities manager to see if he could send me a pdf plan of the site, I passed a poster on the wall in the highway with the exact plan I was looking for. I pulled out my phone, grabbed it with ScannerPro and had the PDF I needed in 2 seconds. Such a great app – everybody needs it.

This blog post was in no way sponsored by ScannerPro.

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Sportsing

Apparently there was some sort of sportsing event today – not sure what. It was snowing when we awoke this morning, and it was lightly snowing for most of the day. I worked out on the treadmill and did some work on the computer. Ash and I thought about doing something nice during the game – like going to a restaurant we normally have a hard time getting into – but in the end we decided to stay home.