Tri State Area

I spent all of the fall and winter working on this project. I decided to created a hang board, which is used for rock climbing training. It is a piece of wood with different depths in it that you hang from and it trains your finger strength. I first cut the length of the piece of wood I wanted to use. I then began to design the depths of the slots for the CNC machine to cut out. I started my design on Corel and then moved it to the Easel program so I could then add the depth of the slots, this took a few weeks. I then was ready for the CNC machine to make the cuts. This took 2 months to cut in total. I ran into very many problems with the CNC machine and kept having to adjust my settings and start the cuts over. The CNC machine also doesn’t cut very fast. At the beginning of this project I was thinking this would take a week or two at max, but I was very wrong. This was a project full of trail and errors and figuring out the best way to do things.

I was asked to learn how to use the embroidery machine. I said I was up for the challenge. It took me about a week to really understand it, but I still have a bunch to learn about it. If anyone wants to learn, come talk to me. I am more than happy to teach you.

This is a flower patch that I made. It took about an hour but it turned out amazing.

I spent this quarter making two different things: a wooden sign thing with some designs and words on it for my sister’s graduation, a continuation of last quarter, and an epoxy birthday present. The epoxy thing is the picture below.

This is the robot that Jace and I made for robotics class. I split the time spent on this project between Makerspace and Robotics. We did most of the coding and stuff involving software during Robotics and did most of the actually building and assembling during Makerspace. The main piece of equipment we used was the laser cutter.

We started by building the main frame to fit a grand piano. It is such a perfect fit that is actually holds the entire frame above the piano from just friction. After we had a large frame, we printed a box that had 8 holes in the exact spacing needed to cover an octave on a piano. We then attached the box to the frame so it spans a C octave. Once we had this frame, we could experiment with the servos a ton and figure out what length of arm makes the best servo attachment to push down the key with the speed and power to create a normal sound. This involved printing tons of small arms and attaching them to servos temporarily to test and then repeating. Once we had the proper specs we were able to start coding some songs into the Arduino.

I think this project went well overall. We had some trouble coding good songs onto it because of the limited ports on the Arduino. We started with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and managed to get it to play almost the entire song. There are still many things that I would like to do with this project. It is easy to copy and make a few more boxes on different parts of the piano in order to do more complicated songs. We could also use a different type of computer with more ports in order to make more notes be able to go at once and play chords or something like that. I’m happy with how it turned out and I think we will be able to add some cool things to it in the future.

In this project I am working on a keycap. A keycap is the top part of a key on a keyboard. Mine specifically is used on a mechanical keyboard. Originally, the I ordered the supplies for creating the mold which didn’t work out later on.

The first attempt I used a two part silicon solution to create the mold of the actual keycap from the keyboard. This required the bottom and the top of the keycap. With the mold of the bottom part completed, I attempted to create a clay sculpture on top. Then poured the epoxy with the clay sculpture in it upside-down. Once the resin hardened, I took apart the mold.

The challenge for the first attempt was not being able to re-use the mold multiple times very well and the time it took to create a new one is very time consuming.

To overcome this I ordered molds online which worked very well and where larger than the usual sized keycaps which made for a clearer keycap. Something that was very challenging with this, would be the bubbles in the epoxy. To remove the bubbles I would have to use a blow torch of some sort, which I didn’t have access to at the time.

I repeated this process a two times then attempted to make three keys at once. The results were bad because I messed up the two-part solution and the epoxy wasn’t able to harden and is still liquid to this day.

This semester I don’t have a 3D printed product yet, but I have learned some basic graphics usage. square(size = [x, y], center = true/false);

Scale([x/100, y/100, z/100]) circle(x); //

circle(x, $fn = ); //

d: the diameter of the circle

$fa: the smallest angle of each shard

$fs: the minimum length of each division of the long term upper limit

$fn: the fixed number of slices in the entire 360 degrees

circle($fn = x, $fa = y, $fs = z, r );

resize(newsize=[x,y,z]) sphere(r);

rotate([a, b, c]) { … };

translate(v = [x, y, z]) { … }

v(); // mirror([x,y,z]) hand();

Throughout this year I spent my time in makerspace working on the foosball table. I helped put on the walls, rods, and plastic figures. although I was not here for the beginning of the foosball table this year we made a lot of progress toward the final product and hopefully next year we can finally finish this project. I am very proud of this table because it is more than a year-long project and to see it all come together is cool. It is not perfect though some of the handles come off and it does not have goals.

This year I worked on a foosball table. I got many things done on it this year. I was able to figure out how to make the holes for the rods, I made the goals for the table, and learned how to use the c&c machine. There were many things that didn’t go well. Some of those problems being the wood cracked multiple times which was a pain. One side of the rods is higher on one side which makes the rods uneven. Overall I would plan things out more to make sure I run into less mistakes.

I spent the entirety of this year working on the Foosball Table. I didn’t get much done over this year but, this is a significant improvement from where we left off last year. We now have an actual table, albeit a barely functional table. We put effort into this table however, especially in the beginning of the year where we grinded out the work and measured all the stuff.

I am very proud of this table because it took a long time to make. The biggest problem it has is that the handles and the bars hardly turn. The handles also come off really easily. The lack of goals is a little annoying because you have to go fetch the ball every time someone scores a point. All these things are completely overlookable when you see the true beauty of the table. It’s an aesthetically pleasing peace of craftsmanship.