Testing the Waters

In the electronics world, we have been testing our infrared distance sensor (pictured above), which will be used to test how much resin is in the pool. We have confirmed it does perform as expected with translucent liquid, but questions remain about its accuracy. Too much or too little resin could cause problems (anywhere from mild to serious), and it is uncertain if our current devices could measure it precisely enough.In addition, we have make...

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GUI

The software team has been up to a lot lately. From adding new features to the GUI to controlling the stepper motor the software team has been working on many essential features for Charlie. From the Graphical user interface standpoint a new print viewer has been constructed so that the user can see a nice organized print progress and data screen showing helpful info such as the resin levels and time until completion. After testing a few other styles we found that dynamic sizers work best for laying out all of the spacers and widgets found in the...

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EYES

A quick video put together of the EYES program. All the kids (and the volunteers) had a lot of fun and we can't wait to do it again! Thanks for everyone's suppo...

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Forming a Plan

Recently, the CAD team had been trying to come up with a fresh and sleek design to set out printer apart from those that already exist in the market. After a few sketches and weeks of CAD design we finally settled on what we believe combines all of the best ideas we came up with. However, with the completion of this challenge, a new one arose. The design calls for essentially a rectangular prism, with two of the sides joining in a sloping curve instead...

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EYES, Saratoga Reads, and STEM Expo

February has only just begun, but the Educating Young Engineers team has already accomplished so much! We started out the month with our primere Saturday Engineering Program on February 1! The event went amazingly well! We were extremely impressed with all of the young engineers solutions to our challenges. We are also extremely appreciative of all of the volunteers who made the day possible, together we raised $2,400 to excite many more young engineers! We have decided that we will be putting on a very similar program in April, for the children...

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A Step in the Right Direction

The electronics team has been working closely with Mike and Isaac from the programming team, and we hope to get the stepper motor fully working with their driver class soon. This whole process has hit a few delays, but it should be done within the next few days. We have also been working to integrate the stepper motor with the z-table, which will ultimately move the part. We attached on the motor to the z-table system today, and next class we will be able to calibrate the distances for the steps and fine tune the program and microstepping.  We...

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Who Wants to be an Engineer?

While the high school was out of classes for Regents and midterm testing, a group of Project Lead the Way students re-visited the middle school to talk about the technology courses the high school has to offer to our upcoming freshman class. Eight students and two high school tech teachers explained what each class entailed and described some of the activities that went on in the classroom. Our high school students were even able to show some of...

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