Category: Vocational Education

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Shop Work

It was a rather warm day here in New England on Friday, so we opened up the garage door in the machine shop and enjoyed the outside air. A few students were working on projects in the shop, which always makes us seem busy. Clark was putting on some finishing touches for the traffic light project. Just needed to drill some holes in an acrylic sheet to mount some new electronics which make up the internals of the traffic light. With that done, we gave the light a test in the classroom and it performed perfectly. Will post a video of the clock working next week.

In addition to Clark B working on the traffic light, Lucas C and Daniel R were cutting using our Atlas CNC router. The cuts were for speaker boxes they have been working on for several months. It’s exciting to see these finally come to life, and are representative of many hours of test cuts in cardboard on our laser cutter. Hopefully these speakers will be finished in the next few weeks. A short video of work happening in the machine shop today is below.

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Tetris

The Tetris is finally complete. This has been a project that is several years in the making. In fact, the current seniors were Freshmen when we first build the frame for the project. Obviously, COVID played a role in the delay of the project, but a lot of credit needs to go to Senior Dylan who has spent most of the year rewiring, creating PCBs, and writing a lot of complicated code to get this thing working. We finally moved it to a new resting place in our shop for some ‘testing’ until we get final approval to mount it in the front hallway of the school. Currently, the game can be played with any smart device. Will have a more thorough writeup of the project coming soon. Images and video below.

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Speakers

While I’m still getting over the thrill of having a new Tesla to play with, the shop was focused on getting some CNC Router cuts executed today. Seniors Daniel and Lucas have been designing speaker boxes. The boxes are quite particular, using parameters within Fusion 360 to control volume specific to the different speaker dynamics. I wrote about it more specifically earlier this year in this post.

Today we began the first cuts of the Fusion 360 files. We exported the files from Fusion as DXFs and then imported them into VCarve. We created multiple cutting paths for different heights and types (pockets v profiles) and set the Atlas router to work. Below are a few images of the process. We will have more to show next week.

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Student Charm

The Robotics Club is getting ready for their event in May, in which we will be competing the the MATE ROV Competition. The students are hard at work building the ROV, and we are very excited to watch them compete. They have been operating on their own for most of the time trying to create the ROV, and its fun to watch them work on all the different problems they have to solve. I took this quick snapshot the other day after they finished having a meeting in our classroom to go over next steps for the ROV. My favorite bullet point is second from the bottom.

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SumoBots

Our sophomore students have begun their SumoBot project. This project teaches students how to design and build their own custom autonomous robots. The goal is to have two robots compete in a circular ring and try to push the other one out the ring. The robots can only be turned on, they are not actively controlled by their creators. The function of the robots must be coded and allow the robots to work fully autonomously. For my end, I added some design tutorials for students to create their own 3D printed casters and wheels for the robots. The caster is a simple holder for a ball bearing, while the wheel is a rim to hold a thick rubber tube. A few photos below of the CAD and actual objects.