Tri State Area

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.

For my maker space project I have been working on a hydroponic system. This hydroponic system has many features, like how it is mobil, how it has lights attached to it, how its structure was built with wood, how it can give enough water to the plants, and many more features. My classmates and I had worked on this for our environmental science class to help create and indoor system which could help grow plants on their own. My job in helping to build the hydroponic system was mainly focused on the structure of it. I did a lot of drilling, cutting, nailing, stapling, measuring, and taping.

During this project thing that I think went well was the actual design of the Hydroponic system. I think its great how we designed it to be mobil, I think it’s great how its easy access to the plants, and the other thing that I like is that if we decided to throw on another set of plants we could do it. I think we made a very strong design that has many great features.

I think the overall biggest challenge while building the hydroponic system was that some of the measurements were off and that we had to make accommodations while building it. I feel like I should have done a better job at measuring so that I only needed to cut once.

With all that being said I think this turned out to be a success, and it was nice to have help from my classmates, Dr. Urbano, and Mr. Mitchell. I think I would love to do another project like this again with classmates where it involves building something, or some sort of system.

This quarter, I have been learning about physics during makerspace time and making a graduation present for my sister. I’ve learned kinematics, 1-D and 2-D motion, Newton’s Laws, circular motion and gravity, work, conservation of momentum and energy, collisions, torque, and rotational momentum. I plan on using that later to make some cool things in the makerspace, perhaps a functioning wooden model of the solar system or maybe some sort of computer program to calculate motion. For my sister’s present(shh, don’t tell), I’ve been trying out different designs for a placard with her graduation date, major, college and memento-y stuff like that. It has proven significantly more difficult than I thought because it’s really hard finding designs that are good, and images that have a high enough resolution. I’m also going to play around with material to see if it looks better on acrylic or wood. I’m also doing it double sided–which will bring more challenges when I get to that. I’ve mostly given up on my epoxy working because all of the polishing and sanding was very difficult and never turned out as well as expected, though I might try again in the future.

I have built many displays for different racing items I have. The first picture is a stand I built for the 100th Running of the Indy 500 winning car. I etched the logos on the back and sides with some pics on the back. In the back, you can see my racing logo etched into a piece of acrylic. The next picture is taken of my Formula 1 shelf. In the middle, it has a stand I built for my red bull diecast. I built it out of foam board and printed logos out for the sides and back. On each side, you can see some team’s logos and their cars. The 3rd picture is a model I made of a Formula 1 garage. On the side is a plaque I got signed by a 2 time World Champion. I built the garage to replicate the real garages as much as possible. The bottom is split into two for each form of the team and the top is open for suites. The last picture has some picture frames I made for 2 of my go-karting achievements.

For Christmas 2019 I got a new racing helmet. I also wanted a custom livery on it. I spent a lot of time drawing out different ideas and taking inspiration from other helmets. At first, I was going to use my airbrush to paint it. I then decided to use a vinyl cutter and cut out stickers so I can change it at some time if I would like to. I ended up with this simple yet authentic design.

Before I restarted @home learning this year. I built a new desk. My old one was not sturdy and getting pretty old. I wanted something very clean yet have some style. I used a spare ¾ inch piece of plywood. I sanded it and stained it to match other furniture in my room. The hard part was deciding what legs I wanted. I went through multiple designs and styles. I ended up with these hairpin legs. I really like how it turned out.

I built a shelf for all my racing achievements and diecast cars. Along with that, I built a model of the most prestigious Formula One trophy. The Monaco Grand Prix is the race everyone wants to win in Formula One. It also has a very unique trophy style. I built a model of it using acrylic and wood. The track layout is cut out of two pieces of acrylic which I glued together. The base is several circle pieces stacked up with bigger acrylic pieces on the top and bottom.

The shelf I built is made out of ¾ plywood and pipes. I cut the plywood up and drilled holes for the pipe. Assembling it was pretty straight forward. I screwed the pipe together with the plywood between each piece. The shelf now stores trophies, plaques, and die-cast cars. I also cut out several racing logos that I keep on it along with the model garage which I built.

This is the pipe shelf I built filled up with several racing trophies, plaques, die-cast, and models I built.