Category: Vocational Education

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New Frosh

Today was the first day of new freshmen for our shop. The way vocational schools work is to have freshmen do ‘rotations’ for the first part of the school year. Each school handles this differently, but our school has students interested in the vocational school do a rotation (a 4 day introduction to a shop) for each of the 15 shops we have at our school. After that students then choose which shop they would like to join for the rest of the year and hopefully for the rest of their time in high school.

Last year the Robotics & Engineering shop had a huge freshmen class, about 19 students, although that has dwindled to 16 currently. Our new group of freshmen is another group of 19. It’s great news, but a lot of students for us and will mean we are going to be bursting at the seams next year. We only have 20 works stations in the shop, so we will need to be creative as to how we enable all students to work on projects each day. Still, this is great news for the shop, and show how popular the new space we built is for the program. I will post some images of our new baby engineers over the next few weeks.

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Pi Radio Internals

Just a quick update on the Pi Radio. I have been working on the internals and am close to having some nice acrylic mounting panels for the interior of the radio. Additionally, I have chosen a speaker to use, which will replace the old damaged speaker that was in the unit when it was purchased. The new speaker is a 4″ Dayton Audio DMA105 8 ohm, which is also being used by another student for a speaker project they are working on. Will post more on that project once it is further along. My radio needs a few more adjustments to the CAD model, and a couple of more test fits before we can wire it up and test my co-teacher’s coding with the Raspberry Pi. A few photos below showing the updated components inside the radio housing.

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Autonomous Car(s)

The Robotics & Engineering shop has acquired a few small electric vehicles, which we intend to use as part of an autonomous vehicle project. One has been sitting in front of our shop for about a year now, while two others were stuck behind some car parts and other debris near the Automotive Technology shop. Not sure why we waited for a nice cold day here in New England, but we decided to free the other two vehicles today and push them down to the parking spots at our shop. It took quite a few students to make get the vehicles to their new location, but I think the students enjoyed the job. Video below of the move.

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Pi Radio – It’s Alive

I had mentioned the Pi Radio project to my co-teacher and he was pretty enthusiastic about working on it. Since he is the coding expert, I decided to let him work out those specifics, while I work on the CAD aspects and building the project once the electronic portion is complete. Today he successfully coded the Raspberry Pi to tune to different internet radio stations using a rotary encoder, which will mimic using the tuner from the radio to ‘tune’ to different stations. Additionally, he has incorporated a second rotary encoder for volume control. Everything seems to be working now, but still some work finalizing the code and electronics.

For my part, I’ve started putting the entire radio into CAD in order to make all the new interior components to hold the new electronics. I’ve finally finished recreating the outer housing, and took a quick photo to show how well it came out. Looks just like the real thing. Next, I need to create some new components for lasercutting and 3D printing.

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Tetris

When our current seniors were freshmen we began building a large format Tetris game. They mostly helped with wire organization and basic construction. The basic layout of the project is grid of C channel holding a 5 x 7 matrix of bright LED square panels which were donated to the Robotics shop from the MBTA. With the COVID pandemic the Tetris Rig, as its come to be known, has had little work done to it. This year, however, a senior, who was one of the freshmen who first began working on the rig, decided to return to the project and get it working.

This student, Dylan S ’22 has spent most of the year reorganizing all the wiring, creating new PCBs, and writing code to make the rig fully functional. Today was the first day we were finally able to play the game using a small controller he built. It’s really incredible how much work has gone into this project and how incredibly well it performs. There are still some modifications that are going to be made, but it was a solid milestone to mention for today’s post. Video and images below.