Soldering Connections and Fan Mount Fabrication

Soldering Connections and Fan Mount Fabrication

Date: May 7-9, 2018 & May 10th, 2018 (Work night)
Location: Logan HS
Time: 7 hours
Student: Alex, Paige, Austin, Dom, Boy, Lam, Joel, Simon and Ben
Goal: Get electrical box ready for wire terminations, run wire and complete fan module.

Students have been working during and after school on a variety of projects related to the DM. For example Lam has worked out a neat shirt design that we hope to have done in a couple of days. Others have been soldering wire connectors, shrink wrapping, mounting more switches and making strings of LED's.

We hopefully completed the fan mount today and tested it. The fan runs well at low speeds, but when we speed it up it begins to vibrate. We feel this is because the plastic screen grid we cut for inside the pipe has not been glued in yet. This was done today so we hope it stabilizes it at top speed.

The number of wires running off the DM are both impressive and daunting because they all have to be terminated properly for the machine to work.

May 10th - Work Night

Wires, wires wires...we worked on running about 70 separate wires into our fuse box. This was quite a job because each wire pair had to be labeled and run through conduit or directly into the box. We are using heavier 8 gauge wire from battery to circuit breaker and then to the fuse box. All other wires gauges vary in size (depending on ampere draw of load) from 14 gauge to 18 (although our thermistors will probably be 22 gauge).

We also had to solder some switches and wire extensions.

Wire termination will take place on Tuesday next week. Then we are hopefully ready for a system test.

Students working together soldering components and wires.

Our circuit box with all the termination bars and bus bars installed. Andy's Micro Vibration Motor
controller is at the top of the picture.

Picture of DM with wires waiting to be run through conduit or directly into
the box.

This is the fan motor assembly test with the support grid cemented in.

It worked well with no vibration.

Simon soldering some wire ends.

Dom working on running some wires through conduit.

This is what 70 wires looks like before they are terminated in the box.
Each one is labeled to indicate origin and some still have to be run into
the box.