No Breaks on Break

While on break, the class has come back in for a full day of work. The class started their morning at 9am and each group gave their 2 week progress report presentation. We used these presentations as a dry-run for our midyear presentation on January 14th. Working all together in the school allows for intergroup communication that would be harder to achieve at home. The other reason to work in the school is for the use of the laser cutter...

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The Presidential Address

These last few months have been nothing short of difficult for the Saratoga InvenTeam. The class has faced challenges and setbacks nearly weekly as we strive to complete our printer by the end of the year. From botched stepper motor drivers, to shoddily made wooden mockups, our lows have been down there. However, we have had our fair share of achievements: the class has programmed the stepper motor, completed part of an amazing graphical user interface...

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Stepper Motor is Working!

At long last, the stepper motor is finally working!  Using the new driver that came in, we were able to have the motor successfully spin at regular intervals.  Our work day will be spent improving this, hopefully implementing microstepping and the z-table if possible.  We've also been busy testing out each of the sensors that we will be using.  The infrared sensor was tested the most thoroughly, and the temperature sensor also...

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Code for Kids

Throughout the month of December, the Elementary Engineering group has been working to further develop the programs that we have instated in the local elementary schools. In Geyser Road Elementary School, the students have been working on using the LEGO WeDo programming to make their creations come to life. To help the students bridge the hardware and software aspects of LEGO Engineering, we created physical blocks to represent the blocks on the program. These blocks were laser cut out of Lexan and engraved with the name/ function of the block....

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The Beagle Bites Back

Currently, half of the programming team is working in collaboration with the electronics team in order to getting the stepper motor working with our program. We have run into several problems, but now we have narrowed it down the possible causes for glitches and are working on fixing it. One major change that we have decided to make is that we are now using an Arduino board instead of a Beaglebone. Recently, the Beaglebone has been temperamental...

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Bookfair Fundraiser

Come one come all to the EDD Book fair at  the Saratoga Barnes and Noble, this Sunday, 11/15, to help support the production of our 3D Printer! For any purchases make on site that day, 15% of the profits will be donated directly the Engineering Design and Development class of 2014 to aid in our continuation of our 3D DLP Printer. A few of our students are also musically talented and will be playing throughout the day and more of our students...

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3D Makeover

Today, a major decision had to be made regarding the aesthetics of the first prototype for our 3D printer. Up until this point, the design we had been going with was simple and over used. We wanted our machine to stand out, so it was time to once again hit the drawing board. For homework, everyone on the build team had to design and sketch up a 3D printer based completely on aesthetics. Our team leader, Deirdre, compiled our ideas...

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Incoming!

A huge goal for the Marketing team is to end the year with more money than the initial value that we started with. Fundraising is a huge asset to our success and we have been doing very well making the funds to stay on top of our "bills." In the past month, we had our 99 Restaurant fundraiser which consisted of dining profit and some locally donated raffle baskets. Most recently, we just concluded a Spa Day raffle (donated by one of our student's...

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Retracing Steps

While the stepper motor control software is functioning correctly, we are encountering technical problems in trying to actually run the motor. We have checked and double-checked all of our wiring and we decided that the problem may lie in the driver chip itself. A fresh new chip has been ordered, so we will soon begin retesting, rewiring, and keeping our fingers crossed. In the meantime, the electronics team will be starting to work on configuring...

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Murphy's Law

For the last few weeks, the programming group has been working on a variety of tasks. Several members of the team are already working on GUI related programming to create a more user friendly interface for our rapid prototyper. On top of that, we have also written a script to test the stepper motors and a stepper motor class to be used in later programming. Working with close association with the electronics group, we have been trying to get the...

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