For my final tech blog post, I am going to be talking about finishing my final tech project, which was making a flashlight using a circuit. First, I had to look back at my sketch and measure the wire length. Next, I cut wires and bent them on the sides so they would be easy to solder. After that, I gathered the switch, battery, wires and battery holder. I then soldered each piece of the circuit together and tried to fit it inside the PVC pipes of my flashlight. Last, I painted my flashlight.
My final two blog posts are going to be about my final project in tech which was making a flashlight. First I sawed a PBC pipe and Mr. Calvert gave me the other ones. Next I had to drill two different holes. One hole was for the light and the other was for the switch, both were in my circuit. Which I will explain in my next blog post. Drilling these holes was very scary. How I did it was I positioned the pipe right where I wanted the hole, then locked the pipe in one position so it could not move while I was drilling because that would be very dangerous. Finally I turned the drill on and slowly moved it towards the PVC pipe. Then I had all my pipes done.
My final switch was very simple because I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it. I wanted it to be easy to use and still not breakable, so I came up with my design. I only used tinfoil and cardboard. I cut one piece of cardboard and put two different pieces of tinfoil on different sides not connecting. After I tested it. This process was fairly simple. I connected one side of the tinfoil to the negative wire and one side to the positive. Next I put the light in the breadboard and turned on the battery by flipping the switch. Finally the light turned on and I was done.
After looking at the examples I thought of an idea for my switch. Next, I collected all the materials. For this switch I needed tin foil, cardboard, straws, popsicle sticks and rubber bands. To make the model, first, I put cardboard down on the table and glued 4 popsicle sticks to the cardboard standing up, two on each side. Then, the two on each side, I glued together. Then, I realized I couldn’t get the rubber bands where they needed to be without ungluing one of the pairs of popsicle sticks. So I took them apart and put the rubber bands around them. Then, I jig sawed a circle out of cardboard and put tin foil around it. Next, I put straws horizontal and glued each side to the pairs of popsicle sticks. Finally, I taped tin foil to the card board piece on the bottom.
For my next three blog posts I am going to be speaking about my three different switches. All of my switches are made with cardboard and tinfoil. My first switch was very simple but still works. This switch I thought of as a key going into a door. I thought of it this way because I hot glued four pieces of cardboard to make a box just without a roof or floor. And then I cut a slot in one of these pieces and put a popsicle stick through it. Now all I had to do was cover my popsicle stick and the opposite side of the slot with tinfoil and I was done.
In tech today I finally soldered my avocado project. I was very scared to begin with because solder heats up to about 800°. Mr. Calvert my tech teacher had told us and warned us about how hot the solder was going to heat up to and told us how to be safe using it. For example he said to ware your hair back and to put on safety googles. Every class there where lists of kids names that where waiting to solder. Ever class after I had finished shaping my wires for the avocado I tried to come early so I could put my name at the top of the list and get to solder that class. Overall I thought that this solder experience got me over my fears of soldering and taught me a lot.
In tech recently I printed and shaped the wires for my Soldering Project. First I went to the library to print my avacodo design. Then next I came back to the classroom and started shaping my wires. This process took me many classes because I had to shape the outside circle, the arms, the avocado pit and the outside of the avocado. During the shaping process for my wires I used many different tools to help me. I will put pictures of them below:
Recently in Tech I started to create a design for my solder project. I used this app called Vectornator. On Vectornator I used my teacher’s 1 by 1 perfect circle for an outline and worked inside it. We had a limit of 5 wire lines so I had to figure out how to make an avocado with only 5 lines of wire. This worked out surprisingly well, at first I thought I needed 6 pieces of wire but then I figured out how to only use five. Also all the pieces of wire had to be touching each other so that you could solder the pieces together.
In Tech, we learned about atoms. We learned that atoms are made up of neutrons, protons, and electrons. Protons are the positive charge. Electrons are the negative charge. And neutrons are a neutral charge. Protons and electrons are opposite charges so they attract each other. Atoms were once thought to be the smallest things in the universe, but now we know that they actually are not, the nucleus is. The nucleus is a small round ball that is in the center of an atom it is very small and hard to find like for example if an atom was the size of a football field then the nucleus would be the size of a marble. And if you want to see the atoms inside a grapefruit then you would have top make the grapefruit as big as the Earth and the atoms would be as big as a blueberry. Imagine how many blueberry there would be! I hope this helped you learned something about atoms today. (more…)
During tech class we played breakout. We opened wooden boxes with safety glasses inside them. We did this because the theme of the Breakout was safety and you need safety glasses to be safe in tech. Along the way all the clues were safety related. For example one rule in the classroom is always wear safety glasses. So it makes sense that that is what I had to find in the box.
