The Electronics Cart

So I spent many hours organizing electronics components into bins designed for student access. I have them on a cart so that I can roll it away. Also on the cart are three locking drawers. In those drawers are the precious things that I want to personally hand to students as they need them.

The parts trays off the cart and spread out ready for use.

I also set up a soldering area and hooked up a fume extractor that was too small for use with our laser cutter.

Here is  a neat tidbit: I had made a 5 volt power supply box with alligator clip leads. To prevent students from shorting the supply, I had thin wires across contacts. Of course it was too much fun to short the supply and watch the wires melt. So I found a automatically resetting fuse to complete the circuit.

The main activity for tomorrow will be for them to hack their notebooks. I have some small sticky LEDs, a bunch of copper tape, and some 2032 batteries. I will allow them to wire up and keep the setup for any notebook they own. The sticky LEDs are very expensive. Some of my students who already know how to solder, can use a quantity of multi-color LEDs that are very cheap but that need leads connected to them.

Here is my notebook hack. Pushing down in a few places makes the lights go on.