Hi I'm at the MARTA Maria College and we're going to check out some Electronics projects because the uh kids here are part of their higher School certificate are doing an Electronics uh thread and they've invited me over to check out the projects. Let's go and I'm here with Dave Kennedy Dave's the teacher who spends most of his time with trying to teach these kids. Electronics Is it hard? Uh, not when you've got good boys. This is a soft class so you only have to do and say things once and their patient really patient these boys with problems.

They don't just give up on things and say I can't solve that. In fact, some of them see problems as a challenge. so rather than seeing a problem as a nuisance or extra cost expense, they they're much more interested in solving it and getting it going. You know, we had heaps of problems with this thing, but we eventually solved them.

How many kids you got in your class? Uh, we got 10 this year I Guess Overall, we probably put out about 120 kids over 16 years. Excellent and they do pretty good. They perform well cuz there's not much Electronics in the Australian school system is there? It's It's pretty, There's a bit in physics, but apart from that, no, it's pretty pathetic compared to the US I think yeah, but we've got some good projects here to check out. Yeah, yeah.

I'm very proud of the boys. They just been marked by the HSC excellent and uh, indications are good. They they're not allowed to tell me what they actually get, but um, but I got a fairly good idea. Do they get m down if it? if it doesn't work I Don't think they should or if the Magic Smoke do they get extra bonus points for Magic Smoke being released? No, that's for the Shed In the Shed.

The situation of not having anything, having something not work has never happened, right? So I won't allow that to happen. So we're we're up and tested. Uh, the latest we've gone to is midnight on the night before. Market Oh, that's the way to do it.

True Engineering Spirit Midnight Engineering There absolutely had a class go up. Um, cheap, dodgy fake transistors? Yes, cheap doy doy fake transistors always fake transistors Malian speci Malaysian special transistors. Yeah, you got them half price and thought you were getting a bargain. Oh I got a bargain? Yeah, right.

Yeah, we put the proper ones in. uh and no problems. but at midnight we had to stop work right? But it worked and it got through so the girl did rather well. Yeah, they're the best.

They're the best and she runs um, her own business now. Marine Electronics in pit water. Fantastic. She actually employs other people Brilant work for her.

Good to see she mainly in the Marine World 32 volts, then communication systems and stuff like that, radar and all that sort of gear. so she sort of went in that direction rather than the university. Direction but most of the boys uh, this year are heading for University entry some sort of engineering course? hopefully? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Fantastic.

definitely. uh. or the case, Yeah yeah, they're good. They're the best class I've had in 16 years.

so I'm really proud of their work. especially the 3D printer. uh, that was a Monumental task. the uh, different sorts of amplifiers that we've experimented with.

uh, ultr L Noise class AB amps uh, tricky with transient current adjustments and things like that. they can be really temperamental. Absolutely. Class A Amplifiers Engineers test B I Really like those cuz the boys contacted the university and said, what? what would I benefit from building myself my University entry next year? their voltage supplies and their frequency generators and all this sort of stuff.

T Yeah yeah, tesy tesy. yeah, pure tesy. And then uh, the electric bike that was a that's a real novelty. Um, and it works cuz it' be hard to get quality Electronics teachers in this country, let alone you know locally.

If you're very good in the uh, in the industry, you'd be in Industry you'd be in industry or you'd be University teaching. You wouldn't be in high schools teaching. $50,000 a year for a teacher I mean what's a stand stop engineer getting 120 something like that I suppose. Um, but so there are only a few enthusiasts.

Excellent Yeah, we need more of them and I'm here with Alex Hey dude, Um, the tie Engineers Don't Wear Ties you know what to Hey There we go. he's a real engineer now it's over in the corner. going to do all right. Well done Alex Tell us about your project here right? So I have an ultral low Distortion home highi so basically it's 0.006% Distortion and gives excellent sound quality and it all just went quiet in the room.

but you know it's pretty cool would you like us to be? And the thing it runs with a preamp as well. Yep and the preamp is also Ultra L Distortion so it it definitely makes it a very gives it great sounding quality definitely and I know it was. It was a good challenge for school. Fantastic and uh the so you built this from a kit but is this a homemade uh shazzy he? so yeah the casing as it sort of put it together as like a cono and then sort of yeah do everything else.

all the marking out all that fun stuff. sweet Have you actually measured the performance of it and the actual Distortion performance? You got to have expensive I think I have to have expens expensive expensive equipment to do that one so nool I can't afford that Sweet excellent work I Love it! You've got the big toid in the middle there. yes and uh it's so it's a dual Channel thing. Yeah so it's h one one board per Channel Yep so you got four mosfets per Channel there? yep and uh, what else? we got power supply board and that would be um, a speaker.

uh speak? protction board speaker protction so it clicks on it0 Volts Yep so make sure I don't blow my speakers when it goes on and some mixing. Yeah, these are equal. They're kind of cheap so they may add a little to the the Distortion but the way I'm going to be running it through a pre, it shouldn't be too bad. Like you, you're not even going to pick it up, you can't even notice Distortion Anyway, so and you didn't really have time to tidy up the wire in sort of last minut that was like I think the project at stake working was a bit more fantastic, bit more important.

all right. thanks Alex No worries. and we got a cool Lego speaker here that manufactured a A out of Lego I Like it, beautiful and we got Josh thanks for joining us Josh What do you got here? Um, this is an Engineers test bench. Although it's not on a bench, but still right? So we did some research and found what the general sort of testing equipment was to become.

and well that Engineers would have y So we've got an oscilloscope with it's a digital PC oscilloscope so plug into the computer here and this is a digital oscillator so it sends the signals in. In this case it's a th000 HZ sine wave and as you can see, it's displayed on the computer. You can change your uh, amplitude and all that stuff on the screen there. Beautiful! And that's a Velin kit.

Yep, that's a Vellin Instruments One looks suspiciously like my old Dsoa Mark 3 design. I'm going to have to check into that anyway. We've got an Electronics uh digital oscillator. Yep.

Then we got transistor tester an insert transistor tester. So basically it can test diodes Di and transistors. I've got a transistor plugged on there and you hold the button down and depending on which light flashes PNP or Npn. Pretty simple stuff you believe? I Built that exact same kit back in N very early 80s.

That's probably one of the longest running kits in electronics. It's exactly the same. It was published in like early 1980s in Electronics Australia magazine. They still sell it.

It's amazing. Logic probe pretty simple. Brilant, turn it on. green light's low, but it's not plugged into anything.

so you attach that to an IC leg and attach that to the ground and it would tell you what logic State it's in basically. and if it's changing between high and low. Um, we've got an ESR meter which is just a resistivity meter. Famous! B Bob Parker's ESR meter designed by Bob Parker So this is plugged into a 10 Ohm resistor and it's 10 Ohms on the on the display.

But also if it's not plugged into anything, it'll flash saying it's past its resistivity level. Basically, you know you can use that to measure the Es the internal resistance. A battery as well. Yeah, little trick there and what do we got here? This looks like a Pi, some sort of programmer a pick programmer.

so the pick goes onto the Z socket there and it can be powered by uh 9V uh, DC plug or 9V battery and basically that plugs into the computer and you flick it on and basically basically load up a a code and program, pick straight from that. um, then we've got two power supplies. One's a multi-rail power supply and this is a 40 volt 1 amp power supply. So there you go.

So you've got Vols and amps and you've got current limiting down here and you can turn your load on and off. So that's Ma's here by the way. hey yep he's back if you remember Ma of the any update on the electric car no not really the electric uh, changed job and just been too busy. Really? I Sold the Ute with a view to make a making a high performance car.

I've got the design but not the cash at the moment. Money? Yes and money and time right. And time time's always good. There you go.

sorry about that. Hey, all right. So then there's the other power supply. It's multi rail power supply so you've got set values on each Rail and you can power two different things different volts.

Pretty simple, sweet. And finally, it's an energy meter. So it is an energy meter. I've had this power supply plugged into the energy meter I think for 2 days or something obviously doesn't use accumulated 27.1 hours.

Yep, and it's done 044 per kilow hour which isn't much couple even. it's still Z at the moment. So absolutely that's everything. I Think cool and what are you going on to after you finish your HSC Do you know? Well I've applied to do a couple of engineering courses I don't know which one exactly.

prob I was thinking maybe mechatronic engineering with a double degree in computer science? Something like that, right? Okay, Robots? Yeah, right? Cool. Everyone wants robots. Robots Cool, right? Yeah, cool. thanks Josh All right.

Thanks. All right and we have thanks for joining us. Kelly You've got a rep. WP Yep, cool.

Tell us about it. Um, it's a 3D printer. The basic idea of the whole project is to be able to print its own parts. so that's what all these black plastic bits are.

So they were custom printed on another rep. rep. y Excellent. So you got somebody else to print those for you? Uh no.

I Bought it from a retailer. Okay, yeah right. but they were actually printed on a 3D printer. You can actually see the uh see the layer is on there and that's the idea of the rep WP right is that it can replicate itself pretty much I think what? how many? what percentage of Parts on here can be replicated like 80% or something? I'm not sure, but they're always getting more efficient with it with newer designs, about two models behind right now and and how long did it take you to build this thing? Um, it took me a few months to construct it all.

It took me about a month to build the Circ board up top and it took me months of testing fiddling around with it. Yep, did you have any problem with your belt tension and stuff like that? So see is is that how you adjust the belt tension with that lot there? Yeah, that right. I had problems with everything. They're temperamental these things.

So what's the controller on it? Is it a uh, it's an Arin Omega Adin Omega Yep and I built the shield for it which is called ramps 1.4 has a lot of service amount soldering. So right? Is this? Um, so there's a lot of people who build different types of rep rats. Is this like the most popular one? Do you know? Or um, basically last year this was the standard when I started. okay when you started.

but they've probably made changes and stuff like that. Yeah, what are these controllers here? That's a PC used as a power supply? Yeah, and I just modified it. Okay, PC Power 12 Vols 5 amps Nice. Awesome! Thanks Kelly that's a rep wrap.

If people haven't seen it beautiful are are you going to continue to work on it and tweak it? And yeah, my friends are pressuring me to print stuff. All print stuff all the time. Yeah, as soon as they know you've got one of these, they'll be yeah. they want stuff printed and what are you going on to next year? Do you know? Uh, mechatronics? Engine mechatronics? Excellent.

Where at Um Unw University? Sydney or UTS right? Cool. Good luck, Thanks mate. You can see the 3D printed Wheels in there designed to drive the uh extruder. Head down in there and there's the head under there and we are trying to get it working folks.

but unfortunately the White Coat Syndrome has uh kicked in and we, um, no, it refuses to, uh, do anything. unfortunately. All right, we think we got it working I think we've avoided the white coat. hit it Woohoo! I Was going to say your head's a long way above the surface, but no, it's coming down is it? Oh yeah, I Just adjusted it up just all right so we can see the progress of this here.

and the red. It follows it in real time and red is uh, where it's printed and how much it's actually printed. And what's the name of this software again? uh Pronto face and it's Pronto face. Yeah, it's running Sprinter firmware on the and it's not printing anything at the moment.

We've got no filament in it, but that's a demo of a homemade rep wrap. Brilliant! And check out the homemade uh stopper on there, the homemade arm which goes across here into the photo sensor in there. so it's a homemade bit of bent metal which then lines up perfectly with the photo interruptor over there. just like in the photocopy.

I tear down similar sort of uh uh. it's a very almost identical our photo sensor and uh, that's the end stop for the X-axis motor. and we've got our y- axis motor down here moving it back and forth and and that one over there would be Zed and you can see all the 3D printed Parts on these. all of the uh, the motor, um uh, mounting plates and stuff like that.

these are all 3D printed. All of this is all 3D printed on another rep wrap so you can see how it's almost self-replicating for all of the plastic parts for this thing. they're uh and and all of the uh, all and and the cogs in there. and the Uh head and the mounting plate for the head and everything like that, it's all printed on another rep wrap.

Great stuff and we got Michael Smile Michael You're on the blog. All right. What do we got here? Oh, we got a class A Amp fire Class A Amp Excellent! This is based on the Silicon chip design. uh yes, it is 20 ws and uh, can you tell us what's in here? Uh, it's just a power supply, amplifier boards left and right channel we've got speaker protection is it and a preamp, which well it doesn't need to work in the this specific project and that's a motor controlled uh volume? po Yeah, it's a nice and you got a huge toid Transformer at the back as well.

Yeah, excellent. And how many? That's only that's a 20 watt yeah. Class A stereo amp and the reason it needs the big heat sinks the big heat sinks is a class A because it's a Class A You got it. Yeah, and what do you? Uh, what's up here? That's oh, that's the preamp.

Oh, that's the preamp. I a completely separate preamp just to make it connected to headphones and just make it better. Cool! And what are you going to be doing next year? Do you know I'll be doing something at University something at Uni Engineering? Come on, you know. Awesome work All right! Dave Tell us about the uh, um, documentation we got here.

Okay, uh, the actual jobs themselves are worth 60 marks MH and the documentation that goes with it is worth 40 marks. So there's quite a bit of uh to to pull off an overall excellent job. The kids have got to do an excellent portfolio as well and it looks like they have this. Looks like a serious amount of work.

Let's have a look at this example one. Which one's what's this for? Uh, this is for Kelly's polio. We'll just run through Kelly's as an example we can probably run through quickly. the one for the engine.

so this is for the rep rap. Yep, we. um, we start off with his original statement of intent, which he, that was what he wrote a year ago when he was attempting to, uh, set himself e limits in these parameters. Yep, and then we go off researching Mhm.

This is, you know, thesis type stuff. This is really serious business and these are high schools. Yeah, yeah, it's a high school. sometimes.

Fantastic pinches off to remind you. So there's quite extensive because the person, ironically, the person that marks this portfolio may not be an Electronics person. They don't understand it. They don't understand it.

And by the way, uh, kitties watching this. A big tip: Include photos in your documentation. Not only does it take up room, but it looks impressive as well. Yeah, doesn't have to be too big.

No photos really make it, but don't W This is really very professional, so we're still very early on in the process. Graphs: I've always said there's nothing better to include in documentation than a good graph. Uh, we're still in research strangely enough. So we're looking here at Milling machines and right 3D printers.

so this is still the research. phase. We haven't even got on to the design phase. No, no, we haven't done any design work yet.

Oh man. Um, Kelly has to evaluate. Well, the students have to evaluate the research. We put it in a different color so people know it's not plagiarized cuz plagiarizing is a a a sin to all Sciences it is.

Um. and then uh, he makes his selection, starts making his selection, starts coming up with some prototypes. Brilliant. Um.

and then we're into it. Fantastic. So we're into the schematics. We're into the surface mount board that took such a long time to do using magnifying glasses.

and of course, you know, as you know, there's and tweezers. Uh, the board that actually came with the job didn't work strangely enough. Oh, so we he had to build this new one right? And then we continue. And now the bulk of the folio has to be proof that he built it.

And he's mhm, uh, rather clever teacher didn't right? So he he has to have to keep a complete record, both descriptive and photographic of what he's doing. Terrific stuff. Wow, there's a lot of there's Dave at the Shed brilliant and Bill uh, an aeronautical engineer who we was in town so he helped us uh, straighten up the frame basically and get to within a couple of half a Mills of Tolerance. Yep, Um, so that's great.

The way that people like Malol and Build come in to help the guys out there. He is building the board there. he is great and then he has to show progress shots because the real border is half that size. Oh, there we go.

He scaled up there. That's a clever idea too. and he's got to justify his fin finances right? Uh, he's got to come up with a construction, proposed timeline, timelines and everything. Yeah.

Gant charts. Brants can't get away from OHS and rightly so. o And well, you know. Yeah, so we know all about that, right? Everything.

Everyone's politically correct these days. Yeah, Very thorough, Very thorough. Oh, this is great design and modification. Yeah, so now he has to exp to modify things.

This is where you score the most marks for your own intive work. doent everything. Absolutely his conversion of the computer power supply to make it think that it's talking to a computer. Yep, with the auto start up, we had a bit of trouble configuring resistors for that.

Yeah, they can be a pain. Yep. and then we have to. He has to list all the computer.

um Computing skills. Broad skills that he's used. that's compulsory. you can't handr write his stuff anymore.

Okay, um, and most of all you have most important of all. at the end of the whole process, you have to evaluate how you feel you've gone, comparing and reflecting back to your statement of intent. Got it? Okay, that's very. That's most important and how you did compared to your Um Gant chart your timeline exactly actual and were you over budget? I I forget actually I I think we're pretty round about $1,000 Mark Very impressive.

and how long did the documentation take you throughout the entire thing? So it's about a year. about a year to document and build this thing. Awesome work, well done. I Was never doing stuff like this at high school.

Unheard of. Yeah I Know we were barely doing this in In, you know and and ta and Yi I mean this is you know it's I mean it's not technically hard like compared to say a uni thesis or something, but it's a similar amount of you know work. It's a huge commitment. They got to start right back at the yeah I me I I Feel that may have been why the marking took so long today that I don't think the uh gentlemen were too familiar Y and I think they C in the senior market because they may have felt overwhelmed and needed some guidance as to what to actually do I'm not sure how how a non-technical person could Mark technical material they're trying is the answer, but but uh, after 16 years of being in it, the results that they hand out are pretty much the way I deal the cards.

pretty much so they they're pretty fairly close to spot. Yeah, there's been no major an anies and it is easy to pick if somebody's done their documentation at the last minute and it's just ABS it's just all Bs right? or yeah, yeah, you know, stolen from somewhere else. So these kids have done great. Yeah, it's a huge amount of work here.

It's incred. it's quite a bit to mark them I Got to sit down the read them all now. Yeah, but this sort of documentation skills in this sort of documentation is very important in the industry. and you know it's super valuable to learn the value of doing documentation like this.

And then you take that into industry and it's uh yeah. you know it really helps you. It makes you stand out from old fuddy duddies like us who uh, who never used to do documentation right? It is all if I was starting out I'd take that to my first job interview. Yeah, course you would without hesitation if they go if he goes to UTS they like a portfolio as well.

Yep, in particular, especially if you're a bit short on the marks. So if you were short on the marks, that that would probably get you over the edge, right? it has in the past. Yeah, what's actually happened. A few kids have carried their portfolio in in and and uh, Kelly has ENT entered into a Young Engineer of the Year award at Wong University too nice.

So his uh, his um portfolio will be set down there and judged with others and it's a 5 $ prize. But more importantly there are people from all businesses down there industry. they're looking for young people to put on as Cadets and then your final evaluation once again. So all the boys have gone through that same process and they're all about 80 pages.

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