Week of 4/6 - 4/10

Last week, Kim and Bella worked on drilling and tapping the power bars for the Word Clock. After they finished it, we worked on fastening the bars onto the back of the clock. The bars are meant to easily carry power across the clock in a consistent manner. The bars will hopefully make the lights less flickery as each row has better access to the current from the power supply. I drilled the bars into the clock with Kim and Bella's help.

While Bella and Kim were making the power bars, I returned to the boat that Mr. L asked me to recreate for someone. My initial design was fine while printing, except for a piece that kept breaking off. In my design, the keel of the boat pretty much sat just along the bottom of the boat. It wasn't perfectly flush to the boat like a keel usually is. Because of this, when I was printing the boat, while taking off the supports from the print, the keel came off with them. To fix this, I tweaked the design in CAD a little bit by extruding the line running along the bottom of the boat rather than making another sketch to extrude from the bottom of the boat. Hopefully, when I get the chance to print it, the keel will not break off because it is better attached to the boat.

After the power bars were installed, we had to now figure out how to run the wires from the lights to the bars. To do this, Mr. Christy showed us an example of what we are supposed to do with the wires and the connectors we have. We replicated his example and Frankensteined a connection with ring terminals to practice what we need to do with the LEDs already in the clock. We also soldered and shortened some of the extenders we have running across the lights to reduce resistance and achieve a simpler look and design with our wiring.