So yesterday I was talking with my teammate and he said I could try make a lab checkout system to help tracking who took the hard ware. It’s pretty clear that we need a. a sheet to keep track of who have what now b. some sort of physical lock that at least give people some motivation to use the system.
Anyway so I draw a diagram with relay and 12V solenoid lock and adapter and raspberrypi and bar code scanner, and it takes like 50 dollars probably. And my teammate said, you know what we don’t have budget now, try be creative. I thought that would be a fun challenge for my Saturday, since I finished the homework early.
First thing is to find the servo and raspberrypi. It took me 20 minutes to go through all equipments in lab to find them. Then I searched up the current for all available servo and ended up with SG90 (9g) since it won’t break the raspberrypi even reach to the maximum current. All the servo has jumper wire to provide energy and I don’t really want to cut a USB wire and match the jumper wire with the cooper so as to connect to a external power source.
Then I looked up online for the thing of a servo lock. Our box is a plastic latch box with a lid, so I need something that’s like 90 degree lock. Found the one with least part and make sure I do not need to find extra spring or screw. I just used the link https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4786394 （ licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license. so I can cite the author and use it for just personal project purpose).
Gladly we have bamboo for makerspace. They named machines under subway station in new york, the old fashioned way is that naming them after famous scientist (like Newton or Darwin) But I guess name of subways station appears more frequently than scientist on instagram. “Clark Street” and “Times square - 42st” are pretty good 3D printers.
There was a little half open hole in the part, needed knife to cut out the support part.
I took a little time to find out the right height of sticking the servo part on the side of box and the part on the lid.
It took me a bit of time to find the micro sd card and configure the wifi because nyu wifi needs an account to login and raspberrypi just take the password. So I used the lab network. The micro sd card I just find one that’s not being used for now. Then I flashed it. The raspberrypi I used was not responding to my ping on the computer. I thought it was wifi issue so I configure to my phone’s hot spot, still don’t work. So I changed a raspberrypi and it worked, good. Now just wired the servo on pi.
I tested which angle was “locking” (that’s 90 in the program) and which angle is “opening”(that’s 0 in the program) so I can place the lock in the right place.
Then get a new project in google cloud because all of our documentation are in google cloud and it makes most sense that we can track the hardware on some google sheet in google drive as well. So I just get a server account, enable the google drive and google sheet APi, download credentials and send to Raspberrypi. Then I just find a reference for flask in the past assignments (we did a course scheduler) and modified the code based on that. I make sure that if you choose return , you can’t return a board that is not even borrowed. There was just one submit button for post, that took a little time. For the format of html I got some help from AI. It works fine, at least.
here’s the link of the video: (https://youtube.com/shorts/daACcGCY-UE?feature=share)
By the way, after I send the demo, our teammates were like you know what we actually want less of a lock and more of an easy way to track inventory. Ha ha, need is changing, that’s what we call real-world engineering. Either way, it was fun to build something. I guess it’s more fun than watching youtube videos the whole day.
Bird of this week
bird of the week is——
house finch!
There is a house finch that really likes to stay around the door of 1 metro tech and its song is especially noticeable somehow during the spring and fall. I took the photo with my phone when I go from the makerspace to the game lab.
I’ll take a better shot next time.