The Heads on Fire Community

We have recently finished developing a structure that enables a woman named Pam who has Multiple Sclorosis easy access to her cellular phone. We accomplished  this by taking measurements of the phone's dimensions, taking note of the buttons locations. The steps we took to reach this goal included the creation of a file on Illustrator, as to provide the laser cutter with the proper design, bonding the two pieces to each other, and finally changing our initial creation, as to transform  it into a viable final product.

Today, everyone in the electronics team had to do research on one of the major components that we didn't fully understand that was in the drawdio's circut. I was tasked with the 555 timer. This is what I learned.

Today Shani gave the electronics team a printed circuit board (PCB) and showed us a schematic of components that needed to be put onto the board in such a way so th

The Wearable’s Project, this project was based on incorporating electronics into clothing. I choose to bring in a hair clip to put light emitting diodes (LEDs) onto. Doing this definitely proved to be a challenge, it was hard trying to wire electrical thread around something that’s plastic.  It also made gluing the LEDs on unmanageable so I had to use a dremel to drill small holes into the hair clip to place the lights inside.

Some of our next projects are going to involve solar panels, because of this I did some background research on what’s involved. I learned a lot about Photovoltaic cells or solar cells. Solar cells are made from monocrystalline silicon wafers and are intended to generate energy from light. Solar cells are designated into three different generations showing when each became important.

 On Tuesday, we went to Mission Trails Regional Park. We split into two teams, one that was more intense, hiking wise, and one that was more laid back. Personally, I was in the more intense group. I was given responsibility of the camera tha had a GPS locater in it and incorporated the coordinants of its location into any pictures taken. On the trip we went on many of the designated trails including ones to the San Diego river dam, and to the lake. We saw much of the wild life including a turtle, birds, a squirell, dragonflies and fishes.

Making the drawdio i learned even more about electronics and the components involved in a circut. In the drawdio we use a circut board, two transistors, two resistors, four capacitors, a timer, a speaker and a lot of wire. The resistors we used were striped different colors meaning different amount of Ohms, the first of our resistors was sriped brown, black, orange, gold. Because of a symple system that is used to calculate what that means, I know that this particular resistor has the power of 10,000 Ohms.

We had a project introducing us to Google earth because we are going to be working in the lab with a lot of GPS (global positioning system) and GIS (global information system) technology. Next week we are going to go to Mission Trails Regional Park to map the trails. We are going to do this by using a GPS coordinate system. The system is composed of 24 orbiting satellites; three of these are needed to the triangulate a person’s position.

Myself and one other of my fellow interns made a tutorial for the ShopBot the link is:

http://change-by-design.org/w/index.php?title=CNC/ShopBot

My personal project was composed of three different things. The first of which was a sticker of Muhammad Ali, because my best friend is a boxer and that’s some one that he looks up to and I felt it was important to do something that had to do with him because he is a big part of my life.