Fab Lab Make Something Big

sept 6: Today we had a second idea to make a music box that is adjustable so you can create songs with paddles that played a xylophone but we can worry about that later because we need to focus on the windmill project.

sept 7: We were still thinking of ideas for our project but we were pretty sure we were going to do the wind mill and if we have time we will do the music wheel project

sept 8: we researched things we need to purchase for our wind mill to generate power we discover we would need a car alternator and fuses but I don't think we will be generating that much electricity for us to need them.

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sept 11: today we thought of how we were going to design the wind mill and we came up with the design were going to use a 4x4x4 ish piece of wood to mount all of our components on a 30in diameter base piece and a 9x5x6 box on top.

sept 12: today after deciding on the project we were going to do we built a cardboard model to show our thought process the model is about 1 foot tall and very crude and has almost no resemblance to the cad model but that's okay because we're still testing out ideas and prototyping and designing

sept 13: I bought a car alternator to create power for the car battery it should be arriving in 5 days and when we have it we can thing of ideas of how to mount it in such a way so its sturdy secured to the base and will not break while in use and remodeled our designs and the other half of our team we're revising our small scale model to show again and it looks a lot more like our cad model than our first one it even has the supports on it

sept 14: we continued research on power systems of cars we discovered the same things like the fuses but i dove a little deeper to find out more and there fairly inexpensive but i don't know if i want to spend more money on this project but we will see once we get the alternator

sept 15: after receiving the car alternator we tried to design a mount for the car alternator but things kinda fell through and by that i mean they would not have worked very well but i will continue to ponder that situation otherwise we adapted the cad model for the alternator

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sept 18: i Figured out a way to mount the car alternator pres fit there's a small piece of metal on the alternator

sept 19: worked on the model and made some measurements on the alternator like the distance from the metal piece to the back and i think it will work and we can also use the other mounting piece on top to fasten it to the wind mill

sept 20: worked on the model some more not much else happened i thought more about how i will mount the alternator and i did a test with a drill and a multi meter and found out that we need the mill to spin a lot faster and the way to do that is to add more blade and play with gearing I've already started with gearing but eventually we will create a new set of blades to make it spin faster

sept 21: that stupid internet thing

sept 22: getting ready to do our final prototypes and finalizing designs. i've been transferring some designs over to autocad to put them in vcarve so we can cut them out but the base isn't totally complete i needed to explain my design to my team because the didn't understand how i wanted to mount the alternator

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sept 25 today I caught up on my documentation there we're a lot of loose ends to tie up and i need to put some photos in still

sept 26 Today we had a meeting about blade design and found that 3 blades are the best at 45 degrees. from video comparing blade numbers and from a quick google search we found that 45 degrees is the best angle of attack

sept 27 we started making our models full scale in auto cad and adobe illustrator.

sept 28 we spent most of the day trying to decide what material to use for the blades and we settled on acrylic and i continued a small personal project of mine

sept 29 I caught up on documentation and them messed around for the last 10 mins

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Oct 2 today we really started to think about how to test our blades and we settled on a wind tunnel simulation and started to design our small models for the test and shrunk them down so they were 10 inches long

Oct 3 today we continued to make our blades and put them at 45 degrees so they are the most efficient and i came in for home room and tried to think of ways to spin the blades efficiently

Oct 4 today i found a marker that was the perfect diameter for a pencil to fit inside and spin freely so we sacrificed the marker for our test and i cut it open and washed it out and discover that the inside was a lot smaller so i attempted to sand down the pencil and i was told that we would need to sand the pencils the exact same way so i scraped that idea and thought of how to make loose and look to the drill bits and found the perfect drill bit to use so in homeroom i came in and drilled out the inside of the marker and it works very well

Oct 5 today all i did was make a way to hold the wind mill blades to test them and i was a simple box with a hole and after building it the class ended

Oct 6 today was testing day and my blade design was the winner but we will do it again on monday

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oct 8 Today we tested more and basically watched the windmill spin and argue about whos is better

oct 9 started working on a new way to test them with a winch pulling up a consistent mass like key chain ring

oct 10 further researched the winch idea and found a mass that is constant and in home room i came into class to get is set up to show my group and have them give their opinions and

oct 11 showed my classmates about the winch and realised it was an inaccurate test

oct 12 got some info on the electrical test and we worked on a way to make the motor spin and we think we can use a rubber band to spin it and simulate a pulley system

oct 13 started the friday test of the dc motor test but some problems occurred late in the hour so we will just wait until monday

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oct 16 The rubber band we used to move the motor shaft was slipping so we made some gears so they wont slip and the electricity will be constant

oct 17 Today was the final test day and my blades got an average volt output of about .045 while hunter got about .035 so that told us that my blade design was superior in making electricity

oct 18 Today we put our designs in auto cad and adobe to hopefully cut out either this week or next week but i think were going to cut next week and work on the whole electricity generation thing

oct 19 I worked on my website all hour

oct 20 got started with Vcarve and thought hard about how to cut it out

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oct 23 Put files into Vcarve because I forgot to save and tested the cut in Vcarve Unfortunately it was unSUCCessful because the tabs didn't work and the dogbone fillets went too deep.

oct 24 all we did was Vcarve and i still couldn't figure out how to fix the fillet thing

oct 25 Vcarve then we figured out that mine wont work because henry got it done quicker than me so we bout to use his.

oct 26 nothing because of the tour

oct 27

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oct 30 documentation and we got wood for the shopbot and worked on the vcarve file

oct 31 today we touched up the vcarve file and made the final preparations to cut it out but then we found out we should do a test cut of our tabs

nov 1 today we attempted to cut on the shopbot but we ran out of time and can't figure out how to get the blue box open like on the fablab web site so we decided to try again tomorrow.

nov 2 today we tried to get the blue box and it turns out all we had to do is turn on the advanced settings in the shopbot program

nov 3 after days of unsuccessful attempts at our test cut for our tabs today we finally completed the test cut and they are a little too tight so we're going to loosen the tolerance so they slide in a little better

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nov 6 looked at bulk fidget spinners and documentation

nov 7 we spent the day in the shop bot room trying to get the test cut finished but we ran out of time because the shop bot started tweaking out and we had to restart the computer a bunch of times

nov 8 we spent the day in the shop bot room trying to get the test cut finished but we ran out of time because the shop bot started tweaking out and we had to restart the computer a bunch of times same thing as yesterday but we learned how to go into advanced settings and we got the classic shop bot feel

nov 9 perfect test cut Mr. Memer was proud

nov 10 proved i was right and that Henry was wrong and that we need fillets

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nov 13 worked on gears and cut it out of acrylic. and looked at some bearings

nov 14 sent the base and mast today, we cut out the base and the mast of the wind mill it took most of the hour and almost half of the next hour because there were four passes per piece and I was told to sit and watch it but because there were so many other things i called it and stopped the shop bot and will continue tomorrow

nov 15 sent support legs and triangles today, we continued the cut for the triangle and the wedges and then i started to think of how to assemble it. i thought i would would just use a bunch of glue but Mr. Memer said that glue should be our 2nd option. so we thought of how to screw them into the wood and make everything so it can be taken apart

nov 16 The base we cut is off and the holes are to close to the center and the supports don't fit, it freakin sucks. I don't think i can go on. I might just end it all now

nov 17 I didn't end it all.

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nov 20 spent a lot of the hour taking about the deer i got and helped brad a little with his community project

nov 21 did nothing because of vacation other than some sanding on the windmill. also hunter said his dad might buy the bearings

nov 22 no school

nov 23 no school

nov 24 no school

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nov 27 no school

nov 28 we cut out the new base on the shop-bot and after it was done we were fitting stuff into the holes and I realized that my design was wrong and I had to fix it so i cut out the proper amount off the base and put the cut out piece into the front of the base and the base was perfect

nov 29 documentation because i'm very behind.

nov 30 i worked on getting the DC motor set up and we made some marks for where to drill holes so the motor would mesh well with the gear and we mounted the motor and it is very sturdy and not going anywhere

dec 1 hunter was gone but i worked on getting the gear on the motor to fit tightly because at the moment is kinda loose and it wobbles when it spins. after 4 gears it finally fit well it took most of the hour the rest oh the time we spent spinning the big gear and the little gear. mike said he would bring in somthing to hold the gear on even better.

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dec 4 wires i brought in a power inverter from home to convert our 12 v from the motor into 115 v which is the same power in a standard wall outlet we spend the majority of class thinking of ways to wire it up

dec 5 wires the first idea is the use the alligator cables in the lab to extend the short wires down to the inverter we made a hole at the base of the wind mill to feed the wires through to the inverter and i worked all class and homeroom making the hole bigger and large enough to be able to grab the wires but the outlook is not good and we may need to look at alternative options

dec 6 wires the wires arent working like i thought and there disconnecting when i try to push them into the hole so we tried to heat shrink them together to keep them from separating but it didn't help it took most of the hour but i dont think it going to work so we will go to plan B

dec 7 wires Plan B is to get some longer wires and strip the ends to solder them directly ontop of the motor leads. we

dec 8 brain stormed "ideas" for a second project

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dec 11 documentation

dec 12 started making a glider plane

dec 13 worked on a glider in clas and in home room were up to REV 4 already and all we need is balsa wood so the airfoils are effective

dec 14 Net Neutrality is about to be voted on. we are waiting on parts but tomorrow we will assemble the windmill blades and then all we need to finish is the bearings and then we will be done.

dec 15 no net

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dec 18 no net

dec 19 no net

dec 20 no net

dec 21 no nut

dec 22 we got internet but the commuters need to be re imaged but its okay now were waiting for hunter to bring the bearing after break

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jan 2 hunter forgot the bearing so that halted all of the progress today

jan 3 hunter brought the bearings so we placed them into the holes we precut and the bearings fit tight so we sanded them down a little and they fit well and now that the bolt is here we had a fully assembled windmill blade assembly

jan 4 the blades don't work they impact the side of the wind mill mast and that is bad because they we eventually wear out a shatter

jan 5 brainstormed ideas to make the blades not SUCC we came up with a design that will extend the bottom of the triangle to give the blades a half inch buffer to hopefully not die

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