LC Technology

Picture Frame

Back to school and its always nice to start the term with a practical exercise. Our new 5th year class have been learning the skills associated with CAD/CAM. This allows students to gain experience with design, IT and manufacturing as well as fine finishing techniques of plastics which they will use in future projects going forward during their LC programme. Some of the designs are shown below which have been changed since last year to accomodate a 6"x4" Photo.

LC Technology

Irish National Sumo Robot Competition 2014

Congratulations to all the 5th year technology students who took part in the second Irish Mini Sumo Robot Tournament which was held in Galway. This year saw a doubling of the number of teams competing from all over Ireland and the standard of the competition was very high.  Considering all the programming difficulties and last minute adjustments to the robots, it was a great achievement by everyone who took part especially those who reached the finals of the competition. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and gained a lot from the experience. The planning now starts for next year.

Roboteers: Christian Cano, Miguel Saez, Alonso Dominguez, Stephen Bracken, Gregory Lotter, Paul Sutton, Maeve Higgins, Sarah Oxley, Patrick Lu, Stefan Gode, Aoife Malone, Caitlyn Parkinson, Alvina Zykov, Kimberly Kietel.

 

 

 

2nd Year Technology

Cars

Having experienced last years success and enjoyment in designing and making motorised cars, it was time to do it again. It is a great project for students to reinforce a lot of basic manufacturing processes and use of technology. It also introduces students to the DPDT switch which enables them to gain a very good working knowledge of switching current flow and energy conversion within a circuit. Below are some of the students finished cars. Now for the race!!!

 

 

5th Yr Technology

Video of the walking Dinosaur

5th Yr Technology

WALKING ROBOT

This has been an interesting and very valuable exercise in introducing students to mechanisms and how they can be used to transmit motion from rotary to linear. The students started exploring this concept having introduced them first to a range of mechanisms and how extensively they are used in everyday items. Combining other aspects of their technology course, e.g. design process, project management etc, students outlined their final ideas on their drawing worksheets, e.g. Fig 1 and 2.

 

Fig 1

 

Fig 2

 

Students then began the manufacturing process combining materials, mechanisms and electronics to make their walking robots.

 

 Walking robot video to follow...

LC DCG

An interesting problem solved in SolidWorks

Every day students ask interesting questions and sometimes even pose problems which take a bit of time to solve. So when a DCG student wanted to draw a tapered helical spiral and google wasn't throwing up any help, a lot of heads started banging together and eventually a solution was found. Instead of using the traditional sweep feature to extrude a circle along a helical spiral which would result in the same diameter spiral Fig 1, a loft between varying diameter circle profiles using the centre line profile of a helical spiral was the solution Fig 2 & 3.

Fig 1 

 Fig 2

Fig 3

4th Year Technology

MP3 Speaker

Transition year students have been busy making an MP3 audio speaker for the last couple of weeks. This project is based on the audio amplifier PCB which was sourced from Rapid Electronics. Students helped design the casing for the speaker using the CNC and production began from there. Its a great little project which gives the students a taste of all aspects of technology from vacumn forming acrylic and finishing to populating PCB's. All stages of manufacture are shown below.

Et Voila!!