This Saturday, Access Engineering held our third lesson of the semester. Some of the beginning sessions were introduced to the Arduino microcontroller and its coding environment. These sections controlled lights using a variety of sensors, including a photo resistor and a potentiometer. Next week, the students will use the fundamentals they learned in this lecture to create a simple two-wheeled robot that is able to follow a flashlight. The remaining beginning sections continued to work with the Java environment and began making applets today.
The advanced section continued working in the SolidWorks environment for the first half of the lesson today. Students designed a hand crank motor assembly. When a wheel on the project was turned, a set of pistons moved in and out of their cylinders. This was followed by a continuation of their computer science curriculum.