Making and Building When I Can

It's been some time since I have taken a moment to share some of my making adventures here at The Laboratory (A.K.A. my apartment).  I recently received and out together my first Raspberry Pi based laptop, courtesy of pi-top and their Indiegogo campaign.  I am now waiting on the second version which costs less than $100.00.  I interact with the CEED Universe program in my pi-top as much as time allows to see how it might be used in my middle school S.T.E.M. classes.  If these get inexpensive enough, they would be great learning tools.
     
I have been hard-pressed for fun, maker time lately.  I am still working as a Model Teacher of S.T.E.M. in my middle school.  On top of this already busy life, I have chosen to train to be a school leader (i.e. a principal).  So now, I also go to night school and serve as an administrative intern while teaching this year.  Busy, busy!

Thankfully, the universe knows when to hand me a problem that requires some making skills to fix.  I have been having my Science students design turbine blades (at least 3 iterations) that we then hook to a D/C motor connected to a multimeter that we test to see how much electrical energy they can make.

The D/C motors came in some Arduino kits that we had purchased last year for our ArdBots.  The wire connections on the motors were extremely fragile.  Finally, today, the last of the wires broke from all of my motors, and we still have one more day to test!  I left work early (and early for me is on time for most teachers' end of day) and was able to get home by 5:00 pm.  I set up a temporary soldering station and got to work.
                
I used flux for the first time, and it was a great help.  I made strong connections to some solid wires that should last for a long time.  Plus side, I didn't burn myself once!  For those that know me, I am clumsy, to say the least.  I can trip over air and fall down while sitting.  Plus, it was a great excuse to wear my respirator while listening to awesome music blasting through The Laboratory.  Thank you Biggie, "Mo Money Mo Problems" helped me jam through soldering with a smile and a little swing.

Finally Making Again

I was starting to get pretty pissed at myself for not building or making anything for such a long time.  Don't get me wrong, I think about building and making all the time.  I find ways to help students build their robots in the classroom.  I just don't spend a lot of time making for myself.  So I made a point of attaching bumper switches to my robot today to practice my first round of touch sensing.

Oddly, I got it to work the first time.  It was quite a pain in the a55 using the cheap wire I apparently bought without reading the product description well enough.  Word of warning, stranded wires suck for small building and breadboards.  They are flexible, but that doesn't really mater until you get up into the larger gauged wires.

I cleverly hid my battery packs beneath the top deck.  I just wish I had cleverly used my multimeter to check that the batteries I was using had power before I made them disappear "under the hood".

All of my coding (and my students coding practice) can be viewed through codebender.cc where I store all my Arduino sketches (e-high-five to Christos and the Codebender team for making sharing sketches really easy).  Search for code under brybry75 and know that the code I write always starts with 0_ or BG_ (my students start their code practice with their own initials under my account).  Today's code can also be searched by name 0_Bumper_Demo if you are interested in viewing.


Hopefully there will be more to share before school is back in session on 02/23.  Then it is back to being a Science and Robotics Instructor for the kiddies.