Not sure why I have been so enamored with making bluetooth radios lately. My original Pi Radio still is not complete, but it’s a bit out of my hands at the moment. I purchased an old Rogers radio from England and converted it into a bluetooth radio, and it works very well. In addition to that I wanted to make my own radio using our lasercutter here in the shop and create everything in a CAD model. Today I was finalizing an updated version for my father, which includes a newly designed circuit board that is modeled in the CAD file. The new board adds a couple of diodes to help with interference from the battery pack, which was affecting the sound. I will post a more detailed writeup on the construction of the radio, but for now here are a few photos from today.
Not sure how these stops and starts happen, but I’m planning to be back on track for daily writing. I guess this time it was my brother’s wedding, which required travel across the country and interrupted my schedule. Or I’m lazy.
Our students are in their last month or so of school, and are working on a variety of interesting projects. Juniors and Seniors have cardboard boats under construction, while the Sophomores are just finishing their Sumobots. They had their first contest with them yesterday, and will have some time to learn from the contest and rework the bots. Additionally, we have some metal signs being finished from our waterjet machine, as well as a lasercut wood barrel top for a local distillery. Lastly, we finally hung up our Tetris game in the front lobby of the school. It looks great, and is getting a lot of attention. Some images below.
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.
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.
Wanted to showcase a few projects that are happening in the shop right now. The first is from one of our sophomores, Shubh P ’24, who took the design on on his LED Light Box to another level. Shubh has put a lot of attention to detail in his project from CAD to circuitry. He introduced several types of circuitry components to the design, which include potentiometers as dials, 7 segment display, and pushbutton switches. In addition, he utilized different sized wood in his CAD model to create patterns within the framework of the structure of the box. It really turned out well. Unfortunately, when taking photos of it today, there was a minor glitch in the coding, so he is going to fix the issue and I will post some more photos below.
In addition to the light box, Prince A ’23 is working on updating an older project from a previous student, a bluetooth speaker. The circuitry for the project is being modernized, as is the speaker box. Below you can see some test fitting of speakers in cardboard.
And lastly, Clark B ’23 and Daniel R ’22 are working on getting our traffic light fully functioning. Clark has been making circuit boards on our Bantam Tools mill and writing code to make the light work in unison with the school’s bell system. You can see his array of relays below in blue. Daniel has designed a connector to fit the traffic light on an old tv stand. We decided to print the connector out of a carbon fiber filament for strength, and after some trial and error, we are pretty happy with the final result. You can see it below in black.
