The Final Countdown and Showcase

There is only one class remaining until our final showcase. Stress levels are high and nearly palpable for everyone in the room as we make the finishing touches on our presentation and on Charlie. A few different part on the printer had to be switched out a few days ago to make the Z-Table assembly as a whole stronger. One thing we ordered is a more powerful, stronger, stepper motor. Hopefully this resolves all issues and we will be able to print tomorrow. If prints run reliably, we hope to be able to do a live print at our final showcase. Also, Charlie has been given a rock-star makeover just for the occasion!!

Our final showcase will be held at Saratoga Springs High School (in the Teacher's Auditorium) at 5:30 pm on Tuesday June 17th. Further information and directions to the TA can be found on the new page titled "Final Showcase"

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Racing to the Finish Line

Now that the end of the year is rapidly approaching, the Educating Young Engineers team is working to finish strong and tie everything together. We are hosting another Saturday Engineering Program at the high school on June 14, titled “Engineering Athletics” that will demonstrate the parallels between problem solving and sports. We have been given great support for this program from the Engineering Design and Development class and will share the proceeds from the program with the EDD team. In addition the Yearbook committee is contributing  a significant amount of volunteers so we will also be making a donation to the yearbook committee. Overall we are very excited for our upcoming program! We are also working hard on our final presentation. We will be doing a presentation on all of our accomplishments on June 17th at the Technology Showcase Night, and are looking forward to hopefully seeing lots of excited young engineers from our programs at the big presentation. We are also looking towards the summer, and making plans for what we will accomplish before the start of next year, so that EYE can hit the ground running in the 2014-15 school year.

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Charlie's Wiring Squad

With our new printer design almost completed, the electronics team is working hard at installing all our components into the machine. This includes soldering wires together, hooking parts up, and screwing in our electronics to the wall. We centralized most of our voltage supply wires onto one circuit board, which can fit right onto our Arduino. In addition, we discovered a way to control our power supply unit directly with our on-button, which eliminates the need for more complicated wiring. 

Although this will likely be our final design for the school year, we look forward to continuing our work on the printer over the summer, where we will hopefully improve it with even more electronics and hardware.

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