In order to get better at soldering I practiced on a kit from Amazon, which has all the parts to assemble a clock on a circuit board. The clock would run on military time. After assembling it and soldering the parts together for the first time I faced an issue. Two parts of my display…
Tag: Girls in STEM
Diameter in AutoCAD
After yet another day in the Engineering Drafting Course I learned how to work with formatting circles in AutoCAD and how to draw dimensions from a different view of the object. I’m getting much more comfortable with using the program, and plan to expand even further out into it. One difficulty I did run into…
Starting With AutoCAD
As part of my classes this school year I’m also taking an engineering design class, and this is my second drawing in AutoCAD. It took a little while to get used to as a software, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. This is the top and side view of a three dimensional…
Animated Eye on a 1.28″TFT GC9A01 Display
Halloween is a fun time of the month, which could be made even MORE fun by filling it with exciting and spooky projects. As an addition to my costume, (on which I have not yet decided) I decided to make a project that I’ve seen floating around for a little while – an animated eye…
Using the Scanner Class in Java
Following my introduction to Java through the AP Computer Science A course I examined the use of the Scanner class, which takes in user input and stores the data in a variety of ways. In this simple exercise I imported the scanner class, instantiated a new element of it by the name of “kb” and…
Magic Five Coding Exercise
This is one of the first programs in the AP Computer Science A course at school. That course mainly focused on the basics of Java programming, following the Codeio exercises as means to practice. The magic five is an exercise in which a user inputs a number greater than 0, and through a series of…
Trying out Fusion 360
In order to move forward in the technological world I need to know my way around industry standard software. I was originally going to focus on some 3D modeling software, but when I saw that Fusion 360 also offered electronic schematics my decision was set. After going through the tutorial I went straight to recreating…
Tetrahedral Kite with Altitude and Temperature Sensor
This is a very interesting project from my Computer Science class that I thought I would share here. The premise is to create a tetrahedral kite that can collect different data such as temperature and altitude during it’s flight, and record it on to an SD card. Our class used a tutorial on NASA’s website…
Powering Up a Pen and Paper Game with Arduino
I recently worked on an electronics project where I created a game of tic-tac-toe, a simple board game played with Xs and Os on a 3×3 grid. My electronic version of the game uses smart LED strips and buttons, controlled by an Arduino nano controller. Soldering the LED strips together has been a bit trickier…
Chameleon 3D Print
Having just received the freedom of a 3D printer, I decided to try out an articulated print just to start with something more exciting. My model of choice was a very cute chameleon that I found on printables, and I got to work. The model turned out great for the exception of the eyes, which…
The Beginning of a New Era
I finally bought a 3D printer! After some though, I decided to go with a resin printer rather than a filament one, because I have more experience using them. I also prefer them because of the finer quality. The set up was successful, and so was the printing of the default test model. I’m looking…
Trans7-segment display using a decoder
7 segment displays are used to display digits ranging from 0 – 9. They are made up of LEDs arranged in the shape of the number 8, as any of the ten digits can be formed from the shape. A different number is displayed based on the combination of the lit up segments on the…
Otto Quad Assembling
The next step to expanding my future robot army was creating the Otto Quad. It resembles the original Otto model, with the exception of having four legs instead of two. Below is the image of the final product. One of the main difficulties was adjusting the parts so that they could fit together. Since I…
Monopoly Bank System on Python
I’ve always played a version of Monopoly that provided the players with an in-game credit card, which could be used in transactions made on a card reader, which was also provided. I was disappointed to see that the new copy that I bought only had paper money. Because of this, I made the decision to…
PWM(Pulse Width Modulation) Study
PWM is a way of regulating the power/brightness/revolution speed by changing the duration of voltage pulses. The relationship between the duration of a pulse, to the duration of a pause is called duty or power percentage. PWM pulses can be generated by an electric circuit or by a micro-controller. Arduino, for instance, has a command…
RGB LED Study
An RGB LED has four outputs: three LEDs (red blue and green), as well as either a common cathode (-) or a common anode (+). The RGB LED referred to in this post is a common cathode. By scaling the voltage of each of the LEDs within, the RGB LED is able to produce different…
Otto Reacts to Signals From a TV Remote
The next step after testing out the walk cycle is to have it be controlled with a TV remote. In order to do this, Otto needed an infrared sensor, which will allow it to receive signals from the remote. Then, I used the infrared library for Arduino in order to convert the signals sent by…
Otto Walks On Its Own!
In order to create my own walk cycle for Otto, I needed to see how the walk cycle was done within the blockly software. The video below shows the most basic walk within the software. The speed is set to slow.
Teaching Otto to Walk
After testing a program using the Otto blockly software, the next step was to manually teach it to walk. I used the set up with my remote, and connected it to each of the four servos of the robot. Using the serial monitor, it will be easy to record the positions of the servos. This…
Solving Factorials Using a Recursive Function
This program will print a range of factorials from 0 to the number given by the user. I begin by defining my function. Every recursive function has two major cases: a base case, and a recursive case. In this program, the base case is x being less then or equal to 1. The recursive case…
Otto Assembling
After testing the servos with the remote, I started to assemble Otto, using the manual on their website. During the process, I had to pay special attention to connect the servos to the correct ports. They had to be calibrated correctly before doing so. The 3D printer that I used wasn’t very precise, so there…
Analog Input Blink
I used an example from Arduino.cc to practice receiving analog signals through the analog inputs. In this example, the wait time between the blinks of the embedded LED are going to be sent to the Arduino UNO board from the potentiometer. The potentiometer sends voltage to the analog input, which in turn converts it to…
Finished Otto 3D Printing
This week I finished 3D printing the parts for the open source robot Otto, which I began printing last week. This was possible due to my access to the 3D printers at my school. The next step in creating Otto will be assembling.
Otto DIY – Walking Robot Project
Otto DIY is an open source robotics project. I have already 3D printed the leg parts of the pre-made model, and prepared the stl files for printing using Tinkercad. After the rest of the parts are printed, Otto will be ready for assembling. I’m planning to teach him how to walk by creating movement functions…
Astable Multivibrator – PCB Soldering
The next step in learning about the astable multivibrator circuit is transferring from a breadboard prototype to a PCB and soldering it. The circuit is powered by three 1.5 volt AA batteries. You can find my post about the prototype version here.
Nice to Meet You, GitHub!
The next stop in my programming journey is GitHub. Its a website that allows programmers to store their code safely, while also giving them the ability to easily restore every saved version of it. I recently made and account on GitHub, and began learning the git commands for working with local and non-local repositories. Knowing…
Astable Multivibrator
The astable multi-vibrator uses two transistors, and turns on first LED1, then LED2. This happens because the two capacitors charge and discharge, sending signal to the base of the transistors. I recreated this circuit on a breadboard to see how its outcome. The breadboard is powered by a power bank.
Transistors Study
A transistor is a semi conductor device that is able to direct the amount of electric power. It is often used to amplify electricity and sound waves. It has three electrodes: the emitter, base, and the collector. The current of the load flows from the collector to the emitter. The main advantage of using a…
Weather API: Pulling Resources from the Web
The goal of this script is to show a six day forecast from the command line. It would include the date, temperature, and one word summary. In order to pull up the necessary information, I used an API from https://openweathermap.org/api Formatting The output of the program should be formatted as the following: **Sample Output:** date, average temp, summaryNov 30 – 23 C, sunnyDes 1 – 30 C, cloudyDes…
Christmas Tree Soldering Kit Assembling
As an activity for Christmas, I decided to practice soldering with X-mas tree soldering kit. The layout was very simple, and I was able to finish it in a couple of hours. It contained three circuit boards, two for the tree and the third one for the base. It’s electronic components included: AA batteries wires…
Bricks – Pygame
I made this project as a birthday gift to my awesome older brother, Max. He helps me learn programming in his spare time, and is always very supportive towards me. Moreover, this was a great opportunity to learn more about the structure of the PyGame library. Originally, this project came from the book “Python, PyGame…
Climbing Snail – Python Challenge
A snail climbs a pole, “H” meters in height. It climbs up “A” meters during the day, and slides down “B” meters during the night. It is known that A > B, and B is greater than or equal to 0. On which day, will the snail reach the top of the pole? My solution…
Digital Clock Python Challenge
The goal of this Python challenge was to create a program which would convert the amount of seconds given by the user (starting from 0:00), to an h:mm:ss notation. The amount of hours must not go over 23, just like on a digital clock. Â My solution is displayed below. First, the program takes in the…
Sweep the Castle – VEX VR Coding
One of the activities on vr.vex.com is sweep the castle. The main goal is to knock off all the blocks off of the virtual playground without the robot falling off as well. The setup of the blocks on the playground changes every time. My solution is displayed in the images below.
Traffic Light PCB
As the next step in the Traffic Light project, I transferred the circuit from a breadboard, to an expansion prototype board for Arduino UNO. In order to do this, I took all the elements from the previous project, and designed a wiring diagram, and soldered the parts on to the PCB. As a result, the…
Diode Study
A diode is an electronic component which allows the electric current flow one way, and not the other. It is often represented as an upper case D on diagrams. A diode has a positive side called the Anode, and a negative side called the Cathode. In order to showcase this, I created a circuit on…
VEX VR – Disk Maze
For this project in STEM we had to program the VR Robot to move through the Disk Maze from Start to Finish using the FrontEye Sensor to detect the disk colors. Detect at least 5 disk colors before moving to the finish. The green square is the starting point, and the red disk is the…
VEX Robotics at School
STEM is the elective that I picked in Dwyer Middle. During this first part of the course we built VEX Robots from the manual and took part in a small competition. As part of the competition we had to join another team to stack blocks on the field in under three minute. The amount of…
Arduino Traffic Light
In this project I created a traffic light prototype with an Arduino UNO. The LEDs would have to light up at the sequence of a real traffic light and work in a constant loop. Materials used in the project: Arduino UNO breadboard 5mm LED 220 ohm resistors wires I used the Arduino programming software to…
Programmable CarBot
Contents: idea layout execution programming gallery Idea The next step in the journey of CarBot was to make it programmable using Arduino software. With this feature it will be possible to write code to move the robot around in every way, thus providing more possibilities for further projects. Layout Car-Bot’s Arduino UNO board is powered…
DC Motor Driver Module
The goal of CarBot’s next upgrade is to make it able to move backwards without having to turn around. Before we do that, however, its really important to learn how a motor driver works and explore how it can be incorporated into CarBot. Here is a study of the DC motor driver board. Materials breadboard…
Ohm’s Law; Resistor
In this project I explored the basic properties of a resistor and discovered some important electronic formulas. “A resistor is a passive two-terminal electrical component that implements electrical resistance as a circuit element.” (Wikipedia). In a simple circuit which powers a light emitting diode (LED), a resistor limits the amount of the passing electric current….
Updatable Clipboard – Python Project
The goal of this project was to create a program that uses the shelf module in order for the user to be able to save copied text under a keyword, and then retrieve it by typing the keyword in the program – which then pastes the text in to the clipboard. As an an addition…
MESA 2020-2021 Participation Award
Participation award for members of the MESA club, for the 2020-2021 school year.
MESA 2020-2021 Winner :)
I received second place in the Scratch-it Up competition for the year of 2020-2021 of MESA day, for my “Firewall” scratch game. Here are some screenshots of the game and the silver medal.
Breadboard Practice
Being able to use a breadboard is key when learning electronics. This was a simple practice to light up an LED. Some of the components that were used in this exercise are: Battery LED Resistor Button Wires Using the basics of working with a breadboard (such as where the current flows, which sections are interconnected,…
CarBot Part 3 (Remote Control)
After the negative results of the last experiment (touch censors), CarBot will be receiving a more modest modification – remote control. This will be a very simple model, with a wired remote that will turn on and off each of the two motors to steer the machine. Unlike the last idea, this one worked very…
Regular Expression for Contact Information
This is yet another project using regular expressions that will help us find all phone numbers and emails on a page which is posted in the clipboard; the search result will be put in to the clipboard as a string. To start, we need to import the libraries that we need – in this case…
Regular Expressions – Date Detector
This python program used regular expressions to determine whether a given date is correct or not. Leap years and days in a month are calculated as well. First, we can import re, and any other library that might be useful. In order to check whether a date is correct, we need to know how many…
Arduino Blink
As one types in their first line of code with: print(“Hello World!”), when starting to work with Arduino the first program will be blink, which involves one of its many components – LED.
CarBot Arduino
Working with Arduino can come very handy when programming robots. In this part of the project I applied some of my knowledge in Arduino programming to the CarBot project, making it able to move around using Arduino code. As it can be seen above, the program makes the robot go forward for 1000 milliseconds (or…
CarBot Relay
This project was intended to understand the function of a relay on a breadboard, and working with an Arduino UNO controller to complete simple tasks. I started by creating a circuit on a breadboard that would use relays that will control CarBot’s motors. Connecting the circuit to the Arduino board will allow us to control…
Equation Solver
As student it can be boring to do math, especially if its just repeating the same thing over and over. Well, to solve that problem, I created a function to solve many equations at a time, using well – more math. Here I use string manipulation methods in order to solve these proportion equations in…
MESA Project 2020-2021
This year dates the time when the MESA project held the Scratch-it up competition during MESA day for the second time. Although due to the circumstances which we all know as COVID – 19 prevented the competition from being held in CSU-LA ‘ s campus, the rules were adapted to the current situation. General Rules…
LEGO Spik3r
I recently built one of LEGO Mindstorms models – Spik3r the scorpion. It was a fun activity. Here are some pictures of the process and final product!
Beetle Bot
This project was a follow up of another bot made a couple of months ago that used the same mechanics. The old version had many flaws, such as an irreplaceable battery, which was why it had a short lifespan. (just like a bug) The BeetleBot would improve upon those things, also a adding a nice…
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Cubit, the little reindeer!
Buggy Code Part1
Challenge 014 Fix the code in the code tab to pass this challenge (only syntax errors). Look at the examples below to get an idea of what the function should do. Examples Solution
Voltage and Current Basics
In order to understand how current and voltage works, you have to start with the basics. To do this I used an electronics kit and a guide, which helped me learn more about measuring current and voltage, and how different elements affect them.
To the Power of _____
Challenge 013 Create a function that takes a base number and an exponent number and returns the calculation. Examples Solution
Return a String as an Integer
Challenge 012 Create a function that takes a string and returns it as an integer. Examples Solution
Convert Hours Into Seconds
Challenge 011 Write a function that converts hours into seconds. Examples Solution
CarBot (Part 1: Circuit)
The goal of this project is to create a moving bot using a parallel circuit with two motors. This is the first step to creating any type of wheeled robot. For now, the bot will only be able to move in one direction whilst the switch turns on the power. It currently includes: A switch…
Return the First Element in a List
Challenge 010 Create a function that takes a list and returns the first element. Examples Solution
Find the Perimeter of a Rectangle
Challenge 009 Create a function that takes length and width and finds the perimeter of a rectangle. Examples Solution
Area of a Triangle
Challenge 008 Write a function that takes the base and height of a triangle and return its area. Examples Solution
Maximum Edge of a Triangle
Challenge 007 Create a function that finds the maximum range of a triangle’s third edge, where the side lengths are all integers. Examples Solution
CatBot Part2 (Limit Switches) No coding!
The next step in the engineering of the robot will be to avoid walls. In order to do this, it will have a touch limit switch, that will stop the corresponding motor to avoid hitting the obstacle. Placing sticks on them will make them activate before the robot hits the walls. Unfortunately, it did not…
Convert Age to Days
Challenge 006 Create a function that takes the age and return the age in days. Examples Solution
Return the First Element in a List
Challenge 005 Create a function that takes a list and returns the first element. Examples Solution
Convert Hours and Minutes Into Seconds
Challenge 004 Write a function that takes two integers (hours, minutes), converts them to seconds, and adds them. Examples Solution
Return the Remainder from Two Numbers
Challenge 003 There is a single operator in Python, capable of providing the remainder of a division operation. Two numbers are passed as parameters. The first parameter divided by the second parameter will have a remainder, possibly zero. Return that value. Examples Solution
Convert Minutes into Seconds
Challenge 002 Write a function that takes an integer minutes and converts it to seconds. Solution
Return the Next Number from the Integer Passed
Challenge 001 Create a function that takes a number as an argument, increments the number by +1 and returns the result. Examples Solution:
Return the Sum of Two Numbers
Challenge 000 Create a function that takes two numbers as arguments and return their sum. Examples Solution:
Electric Circuit
A simple practice project that showcases the work of an electric circuit. First modeled in Fritzing, then recreated on a breadboard. Once the switch is flipped, the diode lights up.
Creeper Design
A Minecraft Creeper design created using Tinkercad.
Line Follower
The goal of the Line Follower project is to create a Lego robot that would follow along a line. The extra challenge was to use only one color censer. The base of this robot is a simple two wheeled construction allowing a high verity of movement in all direction. It consists of the following parts:…
MESA Scratch it Up 2019-2020
The Scratch it up competition piloted in the season of 2019 – 2020. When participating, the team of two had to create a functional videogame in 60 minutes. Guidelines When submitting a game for the competition, it had to follow many criteria and guidelines in order to be qualified to enter. Here are the official…
MESA DAY 2019-20 Award.
Scratch It Up MESA DAY 2019-20 Project Award – Second Place!
Reading Achievement Certificate
A Reading Achievement certificate awarded for the highest AR reading score in the class, during 6th grade.