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this is the electric show we do this every time we teach the electronics
class. I have a class this year of about 13 students
and they're doing six different projects
they pick something that's
interesting but challenging
and it involves
electronics of various different types, analog electronics, digital electronics,
and they do some programing
and it all boils down to real-life engineering, trying to solve
problems, get things to work
and succeeded at some goal they've set for themselves. So that's what they're doing today
well this is our safety cart, and the idea
is that you can steer the cart based on where you
move your nose, so that you can turn your head and steer the cart from left to right
which as you see, John is doing right now
you'll see in front of John there's this little camera
that picks up the coordinates
of where
his nose is relative to the camera
the laser drawing is
a laser art
interactive interface where users can stick their hands in two little boxes that
are filled with light and they control where the lasers goes and they can draw images
and manipulate those with their hands
these are the railroad cops we have three cops and one robber and the three cops
are trying to catch the robber
they're doing this all this staying on the black lines they have
some sensors in the front so they're trying to keep the two middle sensors on the line
while looking for intersections. They can tell the difference between cops and
robbers and they all emit infa-red frequencies and they emit at different
frequencies so the cops
have a certain signal and the robbers have another signal and they detect that
and once they find- once the cops find the robber, they try to turn towards it
until they
get close enough and then they'll stop and catch the robber
it's just a robot that we built on the chassis of
just a regular
toy car
and what we did is we hooked up a circuit
and added these rangefiders
which are supposed to detect the distance that the objects are within the robot and therefore
they send the signal telling it whether to turn left
or right or backwards depending on where the object is at
this is the pscooter, and
the idea is a self
riding, self balancing scooter
and so we got a kids electric scooter form wal-mart
took it apart and got the speed to be adjustable
and then we put a couple sensors on there to let it know about the world around it
and so the two things it knows
is how far it's tilted over and how fast it's falling
and it takes those numbers into this chip
and we did some calculations with those and set them to the servo motor here which steers it
this is the navitron 5000 lt
it is our GPS guided robot
it has a GPS unit and a compass unit. The GPS unit is good maybe plus or minus
thirteen feet
so what we do is we
give it a target point
of latitude and longitude
take it somewhere else, let the latitude and longitude settle
use that second point to calculate an angle from north
and then use the compass
to determine if we're facing the right direction
doing that project, getting through and and meeting that challenge serves them
well to become good scientists and engineers especially to pass those challenges