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11th Grade Projects

Here, you can find all of the projects have done in the 11th grade.

Introduction

Throughout the course of this school year, I have had to adapt to online learning. This adaptation led to me growing in both my workmanship and my efficiency. Workmanship means the amount of effort that is put into a certain task. Though it is easy to put a lot of effort into a task, it is a different challenge when you want to use that effort efficiently to get more done. In previous years, I would either do the work properly, or I would rush it without putting a proper amount of effort. This year, I have improved my efficiency so that I can put in a proper amount of effort while still doing the work within a reasonable timeframe. One example of this improvement comes from the Technical Reading and Writing (TRW) Proposal project, where I managed my time and incorporated peer feedback into my work to make sure my work was high quality and on time. Another example of this comes from Robotics, where I learned about the iterative design process to make sure our designs were going to meet our needs. This year, I have also incorporated efficiency into the programming for our robot, making sure that the robot not only completes our objective, but also making sure it does it efficiently.

TRW Proposal Project

The TRW Proposal Project was a great learning experience for me not only in efficiency, but also in workmanship. At the beginning of the project, we picked our roles within our teams. Each role had different assignments they would be working on over the course of the project. At the beginning of the project, we were given a Student Pacing Guide, which served as a calendar that included when different assignments were due and gave me some outlook on what assignments I would have in the future. Initially, I did not really use the Student Pacing Guide, but as I progressed through the project, I realized how useful it is to have a calendar to help you pace your work. Another aspect of this project that helped me improve my workmanship was the peer review. Throughout the project, different writers from different groups would share assignments to give feedback on them. This was helpful because it helped me ensure that my work made sense and that it was meeting the requirements. We also could get teacher feedback throughout the project, I which I took to make sure that the assignment was good. Overall, this project taught me some lessons on how to be more efficient, and how to improve my workmanship.
Concrete meets bricks

My student pacing guide from the TRW Proposal Project (DRSS)

Robotics Engineering-Design Process

For the past 4 years, I have been doing FIRST Tech Challenge robotics here at the Dayton Regional STEM School, and I have learned a lot about communication, engineering, and even programming. This year has been challenging for our team because we were not allowed to work at the school. Because of this, we had to reevaluate our design process to work better with virtual learning. To do this, we split ourselves up into several design teams to come up with different concepts for various robot mechanisms, such as the disk launcher or the wobble goal pickup mechanism. My focus this year has been the disk launcher. After an initial design shootout, we picked a design that incorporated two wheels on one side, driven by one motor, and a grippy wall on the other side that gave the rings some spin as they were being launched. My initial design used gears to transmit power between the two wheels but sizing quickly became a problem. To fix this, we switched to a chain and sprocket design. As the season progressed, we made several updates to the launcher, such as incorporating a faster pusher motor, weighted wheels, and even a small hump to increase the distance which the ring is contacting the wheels. This process of designing, building, testing, and improving is called the Iterative Design Process. As the design progresses, more and more improvements are made until it meets all the needs to the best of its abilities. The most recent change has also been one of the best. After running into a couple of tensioning issues with our chain, we decided to test out a single wheel launcher instead of a two-wheel launcher. After some slight modifications, we had a launcher that shot much straighter, and much more forcefully than before. This could not have been done without the CAD models we made to ensure that everything would go together on the first try. This season has been challenging for us but has also taught us some important lessons on adapting to unforeseen circumstances and improving our design process.
Concrete meets bricks

A CAD assembly of the fourth version of our launcher (Robotics)

Robotics Programming

Another challenge from robotics that has helped me improve my workmanship and efficiency has been programming. Two years ago, our team’s main programmer left, leaving us with nobody to make the robot work. I took it upon myself to teach myself to program Java. Last year, I was the lead programmer, and incorporated a variety of features to make driving the robot easier for the drivers, such as an automatic lift, and an automated system to deploy our team’s marker from within the robot. This year, I wanted to improve our driver aids, but also our autonomous program. For the driver aids, I used algorithms to help our robot aim automatically instead of relying on the driver. To do this, we use a webcam that runs image tracking software to measure the distance between the robot and the target. Using this distance, we run it through a calibrated equation which outputs the angle at which the launcher needs to be put at. After the launcher moves to that angle, we fire three rings into the top basket. Through testing, we have found that the launcher is accurate about 96% of the time, which is much higher than what the driver would do without the auto aiming system. For the autonomous program, we decided to incorporate odometers and a path plotting API (Application Programming Interface) called RoadRunner. RoadRunner uses closed loop system to keep track of our robot’s movement on the field. This means that our robot can make complex moves around the field and be extremely accurate. The first part of implementing RoadRunner is tuning the robot, which is a very long process that involves changing proportional–integral–derivative (PID) variables to get the robot tracking its movement properly. After tuning, it is time to plot the paths for the robot to follow. Once the plots are laid out, the robot can follow them. This allows us to optimize our autonomous for optimal movement along the field. With these programming developments, our robot is very efficient at completing goals such as launching and delivering field elements to their needed location. These experiences from robotics this year will stick with me throughout my life, as they have really helped me understand important engineering and programming concepts.
Concrete meets bricks

Part of the robot's auto aiming algorithm (Robotics)

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have grown a lot in terms of efficiency and workmanship. These two qualities are important in college because being efficient can help you properly manage your classwork and get high quality assignments done on time. In the real world, efficiency and workmanship are highly sought after because being able to meet a deadline and deliver a good product on time can save the company money. These learning experiences in TRW and Robotics have helped me grow a lot this year, and I hope to use these skills later to improve my work.

Quote of the day: "Gentleman, a short view back to the past..." - Walter Koster