2018 BPC School Maker Faire: circuits

Saturday, June 2, 2018

2 channel RC plane [MakerID-9]

Have you ever owned a drone? Did you think it broke too often and was hard to fix? Did you think it was too expensive and easy to crash? Well, I thought so(I have probably broken 8 drones in one year). Well, if you are willing, I have a solution. Make your own RC plane with (mostly) parts from around the Makerspace. Has slightly less control, however, as it has no yaw control. However, I find that when I fly planes, I don't use the yaw controls anyway.

I was inspired to do this project when I saw instructions to make an RC plane in a Make magazine. I originally thought it was a cool project, but then I saw the price tag: $100. With homemade parts. I could not do it for Maker Faire because of the hefty price tag. I wanted to do it however, so I decided to try to do better and use things from the makerspace as much as possible.

I engaged in the design process by designing(but no prototyping, as there was no time), and

Also, since I had no time to prototype, I had to test every step of the way to make sure everything was right. I had to test the hexadecimal codes on the remote five times, to make sure they were right, and I did constant circuit tests with LEDs. I had to make sure nothing failed, for if it did, i would be stuck with no project.

However, I had some constraints with this project. I did not have a lot of time to do it(WHY does our double period science have to be on Mondays?!), and was also rather lacking in skill and help to accomplish the project. I got most help from online tutorials, which was inconvenient because I did not know a lot about how to do it.

One of the challenges I came to was that I could not get the elevon servos to work. I could not make the plane without the elevon servos, and they would not spin when I pressed the buttons on the remote. So, I switched the servos. But that did not work. Then, I realized that the power wire was disconnected, and reconnected it, and added servo tops. Then they showed signs of movement.

2 channel IC plane

In this project, I learned that not everything works the first time. Well, I knew that, but I learned it again while completing this project. It took about 2 weeks to get the motor to properly connect to the transistor. Then, once I managed to connect the motor, I could not get the elevon servos to work. Then, I had a range problem with the IR remote. I could not get it to go past 2 meters. It was never solved.

If I had more time, I would have added a lot to the RC plane. I would have added a third channel(tail fin and rudder to control yaw) and added a second motor and a fuselage to the design. If I had a ton of extra time(and servos) I might have tried adding landing gear, so I could take the plane off without throwing it(as the current plane does). I would have also possibly tried adding air brakes(again, with lots of time and servos).

If you are looking into this project, I have some advice. Never give up. Just when you think you are down in the dumps with this project, another hour puts you back on track. Just when everything looks bad, it is about to get good. You can do it!

Plan ahead too, especially if you have a deadline. You will normally need to order some materials, and they might not come in time. So, you should plan to get materials.

Also, don’t procrastinate.

Link to tutorial

Cost:
Arduino Board: $15.00
Small breadboard: $7.00
IR remote and receiver: $7.00
DC motor: $2.00
Various electronic bits: $5.00 (guess)
Cardboard: FREE
Propellor: $1.00 or $0 if you have a 3D printer
Servos: 2 for $3.60

Total: $39.60 to $40.60

Friday, June 1, 2018

Chibitronics Flower [MakerID-14]

Hi we are Ellie, Maya, and Zahava, and our Maker Faire Project was to make a chibitronics flower. We wanted to do this project to teach people about interactive art. Art is not just looking at paintings that are by famous artists, it can be in many other unexpected styles as well. Our inspiration for this project, was a short video Ms.Mytko showed us of an interactive flower painting. We all liked the idea and decided to do something similar to it. At first we started with the templates in a directions book. Once we figured out what effects we needed, we tried making our own circuits, many of them did not work, we do not know why. We kept redesigning them, until eventually most of them worked. We were making a microcontroller circuit with a template, and we kept putting the the battery in, but it would never work. Eventually we got so desperate, that we just started pushing on random places, then suddenly for a second the lights lit up! We didn’t know what we did to get them to light up, so this time we pushed on things again, but slowly and strategically. This made us realize that we might not be able to get all of the details from our original design in, so we made our first step with the major part of the project.

We learned from this project that you just have to keep trying and persevering until you get it right. Even if something doesn’t work at first, that doesn’t mean that it won’t work at all. We also learned that it helps a lot to break things down and to start with the essential parts of the project, so if it doesn’t work, you aren’t stuck with something that will make the project seem unfinished. If we had more time, we probably would have tried to finish the part of the project with the sensors so that it was more interactive. We were originally going to use a sensor so that if you blew on the sensor, it would make the lights light up in a way that made it look like scattering dandelion seeds. But we ended up not having enough time to figure out how to do it, so we stuck with the basic plan. Some advice for other people doing chibitronics: definitely don’t give up, because there are many small errors that can happen that you have to watch out for. Another tip is to have a backup plan in case your original plan doesn’t work, which is likely to happen. Chibitronics doesn’t always work out the way you think it will, so it’s good to have something else to resort to if it doesn’t work out how you thought it would.We had to do many tries to get our project to work. We never knew what would happen. We didn't have to buy anything for our project we used what was we had in the science room. This project taught us so much and we are so happy we did it, it was such a good experience and even though we didn’t get the original plan we wanted to, we got something out of it.