Tri State Area

So basically, what I’m working on is CNC’ing a wooden sword base, before sanding it down and adding a laser-cut cross guard. We do this by first carving out the general shape using the CNC machine. We then take the carving, and slowly sand it down into the desired shape. Then, we take a piece of wood and cut it into the desired cross guard shape, before sliding it all into place.

This project was fun, but required a lot of patience and the re-working of materials. The board the sword was cut from originally was a bit bigger, but it had to be cut down a lot just to fit on the CNC machine. I would recommend it if you wanted to build something cool like this, but it will take a lot of time to do.

The process was long and terrible mainly because I made Dr. Urbano keep bugging me to finish making my LED. I originally wanted to make my LED five months ago because I was selfish and didn’t want to share the programming LED strip with other people whenever we would program each Tuesday, but then became lazy and didn’t finish it until recently due to the deadline of the semester. The final finished product is pretty impressive.

The process was difficult due to my laziness like I said before and there were some difficulties logging in to the raspberry pi itself. I had to switch two SD cards and figure out a new program to run what I needed to run because my original program, PuTTy stopped working with my computer so I downloaded a program named SmarTTY. SmarTTY did come with a smart terminal and other more advanced interface features. Downloading this new program did end up helping me in the long run.

I learned to have better time management, to not procrastinate, and I plan to do a lot of programming over the summer.

-Starley

My work during these days has been a fishing lure, since fishing is one of my favorite hobbies and with which I try to spend time during the summer and sometimes in winter. For all work you must follow a few steps, and these have been mine to carry out my project:

1. The first step was to choose what to do, and after choosing it, I decided
   the materials that I should use for the moment. My materials were the following: wood, waterproof adhesive paper, paint and stainless steel rods for 1mm TIG welding.

2. Once the waterproof wood (elm wood) was chosen, I had to draw the sketch, choose the measurement I wanted for my fish (length and width). After this, use the table saw to cut the piece and then draw the figure of the fish on the wood to later sand it.

3. After deciding to use the sanding machine, I began to sand on the sides to give it a cylindrical shape, but making the peaks a little less thick, at the same time giving it a curved shape for the fish’s back.

4. Then, I took the rod and shaped it to hook the hooks and be able to tie a knot with the thread. After this I took a machine and made a cut along the fish, without dividing it in two and put the rod inside this cut.

5. Finally I used putty for wood to cover and that the rod did not come out. Then, I incorporated the silver colored adhesive paper to the fish and with a knife I cut it so that it covered all the parts

When I started to do online learning for this year I built a table. I built this table because the previous table that I had was not good for online learning. I wanted this table to have some style to it so I looked on the internet trying to find legs that had some style to them. I first found some legs that I liked but they ended up being out of stock, so I had to look again and ended up with these legs with two triangles conected to each other. I bought a butcher block table top and sanded it down. I spent time trying out different stains to get a stain that I like and ended up with this shade of brown for the stain. The attachment on the bottem of the table is a foot hammock that I take off sometimes. I like how it turned out.

One project that took a majority of the last quarter was the wall that Ella, Alex, Kate, and I painted. First we lined the walls with blue tape to keep the painted space well contained. Second, we painted the wall with blue paint we got from the art room. We looked at pictures for inspiration and then decided to make an outline. We drew the word “Makerspace” across the wall in bubble letters. Then we drew drips along the top. After everything was outlined we began to paint.

We painted the letters with yellow acrylic paint. After the letters we painted the drips with bright pink acrylic paint. The painting took a long time, especially since things didn’t dry very evenly. We had to do multiple coats on the pink drips. Once we were finished we outlined the letters and drips using a black paint pen. Overall the painting process took the longest and multiple coats were needed.

Everything generally went very well. Next time I would get better paint like the blue that we used. I would also be sure to get paint pens at the beginning. We had to wait a little bit before being able to do the outline. Next time I’ll be more prepared with my materials. With this knowledge things will go much more smoothly for future projects.

Overall this year has been a good maker space year one of the project was cleaning the entrance to the tri state area of the maker space I did this project with Ella,Kate and Lizzie we cleaned out the maker space we took trash from places it didn’t belong we organized drawers etc.

We than moved on to another project which was to paint a meaningful word or phrase so we chose the would obviously maker space in sunny yellow color and the drips in hot pink color we couldn’t decide at first which color shade of blue to do for the background so we decided on a baby blue color. We also decided a font for the word maker space and that was bubble letters. This year has been a great year to do maker space as an elective because you can not only can you do what you want but to express all, your feelings through art through this rough time.

For my fourth quarter makerspace project Kate, Alex, Lizzie, and I decided to paint the wall next to the entrance of the Tri State Area. We painted the wall light blue, with pink drips, and the word “MAKERSPACE” in yellow paint. The blue paint is wall paint and the pink and yellow paint are acrylic. This project took a couple of weeks for us to finish. The first step was drawing the drips and letters out in pencil. Then we painted the background, then the drips, and letters. We went over each color a couple of times and did touch ups on places we missed while painting. Lastly we took a black paint marker and outlined the drips and letters. Something that went well during this project was the actual painting of everything, once we had colors and design sorted out the actual painting was very easy and relaxing to work on. A challenge that we ran into was that everyday we would have to remix the pink and yellow paints to get the right shade from the previous day but, overall this was easy to resolve. I really enjoyed doing this project and I would really enjoy doing another painting in the future.

This quarter, I have worked on programming and developing a LED light strip, using raspberry pi. Throughout the process I have learned much about coding and prgramming, and mulitple occurances throughout the process made this experience more informative. For example, when running through issues on my computer, I found places that I could fix, things to make it and the raspberry pi work better, and so forth. Especially the breakdowns on the raspberry pi itself; now I feel that I understand what it is and how it works in much more detail. The procedure went like so: First, I read through the instrutcions for the coding and programming listed, and made sure that I understood each step- so I didn’t mess up anything in the base of the code. Next, the programming process begun, and there are multiple progams now set up on my computer- including the webpage to control the lights. Next, I’ll be working on a better-designed piece of wood to put my LED strip on.