Homeward Bound!
Our light boxes all went home this weekend. 4 first year groups finished up a 3 week project glueing, spray painting, CNC'ing, sanding, soldering and wiring their boxes together. This week was the final assembly...
...closely followed by the big reveal!
They look awesome! Congratulations to all the kids for working so hard on this cool project.
DIY.org Wrap Up and Pulse Width Modulation
Our "Guinea Pigs" spent a bit of time this week wrapping up some work from earlier in the term. We had a couple of outstanding DIY.org projects so that was the first order of the day.
Our "Solar Engineer" Ritesh completed his Solar Powered USB Charger...
While the others tested the home built Stomp Rocket...
After that we all returned to the studio and kept working on our Arduino Base Boards. There was a little bit more assembly...
... before we got ourselves to the point where we could start turning things on.
The first project we used the base boards for was learning how to dim an LED using PWM or "Pulse Width Modulation". PWM uses rapidly pulsing bursts of voltage to control the average amount of power getting to a device. Longer pulses means a greater average, so an LED glows brighter, shorter pulses means a dimmer LED.
If you want to learn more you can watch Colin, one of the more eccentric makers on the "Make:" youtube channel explain:
The reason we needed to learn about PWM is that it is the principle used in "Motor Controllers" and for the project we are tackling next we are going to need a way to control how fast our motors spin.
So the last thing we did this week was attach a Motor Controller to our Arduino boards...
Hopefully that has created a small sense of excitement and anticipation around what it is that we are going to be using our motors for!
Have a great Easter everybody. See you all in a couple of weeks.