Franklin Honigberg

Hi! My name is Franklin.

This is a photo of me, my parents, and my sister somewhere in Boston. An engineering area of strength is my ability to think very logically about a problem. I find that I always look at problems as a set of tasks that are very clearly defined. This helps me break down complex problems into small tasks that I can achieve. I definitely need to work on my documenting skills. I often find that I skip over this step but I realize that it is an important step of the design/fab process. Because of this the three commitments I am going to make when writing my blog posts is to clearly explain the problem and how I solved it, add clear photos, and show the entire build process, not just the end result.

Day 5 - PCB Design stage

During class today, me and my partner Tara, made 5 designs for our LED PCB. In the end, we decided with the Menorah. The reason we chose the design was because it matches the theme of LED's. We almost went with a flash light but there was a coin toss and we ended up choosing the Menorah. Making this in EAGLE is going to be a slight challenge simply because the candles are going to be so thin. This is going to be interesting. Also, for the time being I do not have Tara's 3 designs so I am going to have to upload them tomorrow morning in class.

Day 7 - Implementing the circuit and PCB in EAGLE

This is the design me and Tara made in EAGLE. We decided to make a menorah and have each light toggleable by a specific button. Something that I learned is that having one resistor for 9 parallel circuits is not the same as having 9 resistors for 9 parallel circuits. It actually changes how bright the lights will be, and this is important to know going forward.

Day 8 - Speaker Ideation

These are my ideas for my speaker design. My top three choices are the silly looking headphones, the TV, and the jet engine. A challenge when making these (the jet engine in particular) is getting very natural curvy edges.

Day 10 - Speaker Ideation feedback

The Post-Its on the left are warm and the Post-Its on the right are cool. So far the feedback I have gotten is that the headphones would be tricky to build. I was also told that I should make the jet engine design.

Day 11 - Speaker Ideation on paper finalization

Day 13 - Speaker Ideation in Rhino

This is definitely a very rough sketch, but I was thinking of making something like this. The edges of the jet also need to be serrated, but I can work on that later. I was going to 3d print the curves, and then use wood for the stand. I am slightly worried about the stand and if it can support the weight of the speakers. I am going to need to do a lot of testing.

Day 18 - Amplifier Breadboard circuit

This is my Amplifier breadboard design. Making this was difficult because I was using a different breadboard than the guide so I was going entirely off the schematics. It worked right after I finished but then it broke and I was having such a hard time getting it to work again. It turns out that a wire probably shook loose and while trying to fix it, I may have damaged it further. Also, something interesting I found is that my IC does not have a working pin for volume control. I am going to have to re-solder that. While making this I learned that some breadboard
are just not big enough. Hopefully this is clear from the small breadboard I had to add to make room.

Day 19 - Cardboard sketch

This is my cardboard model. It was pretty difficult to make because of the complex curves. I am not too worried about fabricating it because I can 3d print the complex parts. The frame will be made of wood.

Day 23 - EAGLE PCB Schematic and Board

This is me and Olivia's PCB. Olivia connected all the components in the schematic and I double checked her connections and made the PCB. During this project I was able to strengthen my ability to read schematics and PCBs just because there are so many more connections here.

Day 24 - Python exercises 1

Here is the link to our doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x5B3_7iG4Rx9KPQi3hJYVFcpIbM6V6HDsvEzKXmLL7Y/edit

Here is our second doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PoEYgdCi0VUM_yS7_wi8J0ToV1uA710naMzSHXyxs48/edit

Day 26 - Microcontroller challenge (DVD logo)

This is me and Taran's challenge. This was not on the list of challenges but it was still a challenge to create. This is a program which does the DVD logo bouncing animation. It works by essentially flipping the x speed and y speed every time it hits a wall. A challenge we overcame while creating this was because we were missing a negative sign in the code. This was a pain to debug because of how subtle it was.

Our code is here.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzZm4OHSGyG/ It made it on the lwtecharts insta.

Day 27 - Microcontroller challenge (Max temp in sf)

This is me and Taran's second challenge. We modified the program which gives you the current temperature in San Francisco to give you the maximum temperature for that day. One challenger we overcame was signing up for the openweather api. It turns out there was a key provided in the assignment but we I didn't see that.

The code is here.

Digital project idea

This is the idea I have for my digital project. It is going to be on the back of the engine and it is going to be that ring shaped light with all of the components on it (I forget what it is called). It is going to light up some acrylic flames on the back of my speaker with a brightness in relation to the volume of the music. Hopefully it shouldn't be too hard because I could just read the voltage level of whatever is going into the speaker.

Amp PCB

This is my amp circuit before I solder all of the components on to it. Me and Olivia made it.

Custom PCB from the start of the year

This is a menorah me and Tara worked on near the start of the year. This was a fun project and I learned how to design a schematic and board on EAGLE. You can see that there are 9 switches for the shamash and the 8 nights. This has been on our wall throughout Hanukkah this year.

Build process picture

This is a photo of where I am in my building process. I am more or less finished but I need to 3d print a stand. I also need to finish soldering my amp. The digital project is a light ring and that is also finished.

AMP Soldered circuit

This is my soldered amp circuit. I think I got much better at soldering while doing this.

FINAL AMP

What did you make?

I made a jet engine speaker where instead of the fan up front, there is a speaker. It is on a small (maybe too small) stand which is made out of laser cut plywood.

Thinking about the work you created, what are you most satisfied with this semester?

I am most proud of the stand on my speaker because it was by far the easiest part to assemble and it came together very cleanly. The entire thing is a very tight press-fit and there is almost no glue.

If you were to start over, knowing what you know, what would I do differently?

I would make the inside use 1/4" plywood instead of 1/8" MDF because it kept breaking so much and it was way too flimsy.

What is a lesson from this class that you will take with you and use in future projects?

I will make SURE to think about the sturdiness of my materials before building something. That MDF seriously gave me some trauma when building it with the amount of times it broke.

FINAL DIGITAL PROJECT

Link to code: https://gist.github.com/TheStressTest/4f2e326d3201c9c42b67e925ed40b87e

I initially planned to make a luminous exhaust light for the amp, but I unfortunately ran out of time so I opted to make the speaker glow from the bottom.A challenge I faced was space and time. I unfortunately I ran out of time near the end so I had to make some compromises, and I also ran out of space, so getting the wiring in was a tight fit.