Tag: vocational education

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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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Health Assisting

Today the Health Assisting teachers asked me to draw up a plan of their classroom so they can continue to be an accredited location for taking the CNA test. They have been a location for several years, however, for some reason the requirements to maintain that status has now changed and they must provide a fairly robust packet of materials in order to prove their worth. One part of that packet is a plan of the classroom as well as site plan showing how one enters the building and makes their way to the classroom. It was nice to utilize my architecture skills to help them out. Will post the plan below.

Health-Assisting-Classroom-PlanDownload
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Pi Radio Sound

Worked on the Pi Radio today. Needed to do some soldering to create a 3.5 TS audio jack to a 2 pin connector for an amplifier. I used a Raspberry Pi as a 5v power source since it was just sitting at my desk. The audio jack is plugged into my computer speakers and is now playing sound through the speaker in the Emerson radio.

Next thing to do is make sure the code on the Raspberry Pi is working correctly and plug the audio jack into it. I will make final connections for the digital encoders and then take everything apart of repaint the casing. Getting very close. Here is a short video of some audio coming from the radio.

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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.