TCA Engineering

Personal Retrospective at the end of Makerspace What was the build that you are most proud of and why? I am really proud of both the digital dice and my final build. Both of these projects pushed my programming and coding limits beyond what I have used for a number of years. I have enjoyed programming, but since I took my current teaching job I teach pretty much the same coding lessons every year and they don't go very deep. These activities let me try out some coding skills beyond what I teach to my students on an annual basis.  Go back to your first week and read each week’s submission with an eye for personal growth. Where were you when you started and where did you end up? To be honest the first couple of weeks were pretty boring for me, which is why I tried to spice it up by adding in the RGB or the other extension projects. The initial LED projects are almost identical to what I teach my students so I already know most of the ins-and-outs around those projects. T

My goal for this project was to create a locking safe. The safe would be locked and would only unlock if the correct code is put into the safe. I also wanted to include a Master/Override code that would allow a consumer to set their own Access Code for the Safe. Here is my Video of the Safe Working. This Safe took a bunch of coding and I really enjoyed the challenge. The past six years all of my coding challenges have been in the role of teaching students, and after awhile their codes become rudimentary and repetitive. Even my most advanced students only scratch the surface with the robotics that we do in my classes. (As a side note, next Spring (2019) I have been given the green light to teach a whole coding class to my students. I am quite excited to expand our exposure with computer programming). Below is a video of me walking through the code.  Now that you've seen the final products. Here is the journey of how I got there. First I wanted to do a completely

This week I completed activity 11: relays. I have worked with motors and servos before, so I skipped those chapters, and relays were the first topic I have no experience with. I learned that a relay works like a physical switch, similar to the buttons and transistors. The added benefit of a relay is that it is able to handle much higher voltages and currents. For instance, we can turn the arduino port on and off like a switch, but the arduino can only produce up to 5.0 Volts. The Relay allows for the low voltage arduino to control a gate for a high voltage/current source, such as a wall outlet. I did not end up going this far in the project, but it is nice to know that an arduino could be used to control higher powered devices. Part 1: Tutorial During this portion I constructed the circuit from the provided example. I ran into two main challenges during this portion. The first challenge is that the relay in my kit was not designed for a breadboard as the legs did not align with the