Student needs help for high school science teacher
Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 8:59 pm
I am currently a junior in high school and am an avid electronics buff. I am attending a tech prep program through my high school's "vocational program" for electronics, and am so eager to learn just how all of this stuff works. My main future interests as far as electronics goes are in pic and wireless control, for robotics. Our "trade school" competes in robotics competitions every year, and I really want to help out as much as I can. I took apart my first radio when I was 10 and looked at all the beautiful colored components with wonder, and really wanted to know how they all worked. Not knowing any better, I ended up prying them all out with a screwdriver .
My uncle, an electronics engineer who lives out in California, was in town on my 12th christmas, and purchased a whole bunch of electronics stuff for me, not the crappy radioshack stuff, nice, technician-grade tools. Just today I acid etched my first board, a pic programmer, which turned out looking great, but I really have no idea how to do pic programming yet . I have accumulated a good collection of electronics components, junk, and knowledge, but I have a dabbling of basic electronics, nothing fancy. I wish I could learn it all faster, but my teacher can only teach so fast.
I recently found out that my freshman highschool introductory physical science teacher was retiring this year, and I talked with him for a while. He is a great person, and me and all peers that have had him will feel an empty void at the beginning of next year when we look to his classroom and are not greeted by the cheerfully mischeivous old man whom we are all so familiar with. He told me aout some plans for this year, how he would leave the school "a little more shaken up than it was when he found it" and what he planned on doing. He wants to do a lot, one of his projects being to build a giant letter "F" (stands for failure) out of legos, in one of our staircases HUGE windows. But among some of his ideas were two that he thought I would take a liking to. I am not very inclined to deny him of these two ambitions, because i know they are relatively easy to build, I just have no idea how to build them. I have added them to my to do list as a semi high priority, as seeing we are already through our first grading period, and he does not have even a whole school year left.
1. Build a large (eg 5x7) 3-digit-display up / down counter with two buttons so that he can change the numbers either up or down by one number at a time. He wants this to be then mounted and framed in like a shoebox or something and decorated by his current students as "Mr. Stark's Countup/down to Retirement" or something like that. He wants to be able to edit it thought, because of snowdays or something, and he only wants to count school days. I was thinking a switch debounced counter circuit, but i'm seriously having a hard time getting anything to work.
2. This one is proving to be trickier. A remote controller battery powered volume controller that splices into the school's pa system above the drop ceiling tiles. Me and my otherclassmates always would be in the middle of a very important discussion with the teacher, and at least one time a week would be interrupted by and annoyingly loud screeching secretary telling us that the cheerleaders would be meeting in the south parking lot instead of the north one today.....blah...blah.....and on and on. We would try to talk over her, but her blahing was always loud enough to drown us out. It gets annoying. We want a small key-fob sized remote to be able to adjust the volume of the amplified signal of the pa system. And the lowest volume setting preferably be mute, just in case the announcement is particularly annoying haha. This one is stumping me.
Any help with these circuits would be greatly appreciated, I can do basic parts layouts, schematics, and board drawings for etching, so i should be able to easily fabricate any finished product.
Thank you so much, and any words of advice or encouragement you would have for a beginning electrician will be taken with the upmost respect.
My uncle, an electronics engineer who lives out in California, was in town on my 12th christmas, and purchased a whole bunch of electronics stuff for me, not the crappy radioshack stuff, nice, technician-grade tools. Just today I acid etched my first board, a pic programmer, which turned out looking great, but I really have no idea how to do pic programming yet . I have accumulated a good collection of electronics components, junk, and knowledge, but I have a dabbling of basic electronics, nothing fancy. I wish I could learn it all faster, but my teacher can only teach so fast.
I recently found out that my freshman highschool introductory physical science teacher was retiring this year, and I talked with him for a while. He is a great person, and me and all peers that have had him will feel an empty void at the beginning of next year when we look to his classroom and are not greeted by the cheerfully mischeivous old man whom we are all so familiar with. He told me aout some plans for this year, how he would leave the school "a little more shaken up than it was when he found it" and what he planned on doing. He wants to do a lot, one of his projects being to build a giant letter "F" (stands for failure) out of legos, in one of our staircases HUGE windows. But among some of his ideas were two that he thought I would take a liking to. I am not very inclined to deny him of these two ambitions, because i know they are relatively easy to build, I just have no idea how to build them. I have added them to my to do list as a semi high priority, as seeing we are already through our first grading period, and he does not have even a whole school year left.
1. Build a large (eg 5x7) 3-digit-display up / down counter with two buttons so that he can change the numbers either up or down by one number at a time. He wants this to be then mounted and framed in like a shoebox or something and decorated by his current students as "Mr. Stark's Countup/down to Retirement" or something like that. He wants to be able to edit it thought, because of snowdays or something, and he only wants to count school days. I was thinking a switch debounced counter circuit, but i'm seriously having a hard time getting anything to work.
2. This one is proving to be trickier. A remote controller battery powered volume controller that splices into the school's pa system above the drop ceiling tiles. Me and my otherclassmates always would be in the middle of a very important discussion with the teacher, and at least one time a week would be interrupted by and annoyingly loud screeching secretary telling us that the cheerleaders would be meeting in the south parking lot instead of the north one today.....blah...blah.....and on and on. We would try to talk over her, but her blahing was always loud enough to drown us out. It gets annoying. We want a small key-fob sized remote to be able to adjust the volume of the amplified signal of the pa system. And the lowest volume setting preferably be mute, just in case the announcement is particularly annoying haha. This one is stumping me.
Any help with these circuits would be greatly appreciated, I can do basic parts layouts, schematics, and board drawings for etching, so i should be able to easily fabricate any finished product.
Thank you so much, and any words of advice or encouragement you would have for a beginning electrician will be taken with the upmost respect.