During the junior year of high school I took a class called internship. This class gives students real world experience in a work environment. To pass the class one has to intern at a place of their choice sixty hours. I decided to apply for an internship at The Columbus Idea Foundry. The Columbus Idea Foundry is a Makerspace; a place where anybody can go and use a wide variety of tools that otherwise wouldn’t be available. After some time of working there I was assigned to work on a project that would soon become my favorite project during the entire internship. The project was to build six one-foot tall trophies that featured a glowing, 3d printed, crystal. These trophies were going to be given at an event called Venture Next hosted by Rev1 …show more content…
The prototype was built on a breadboard so that the components could be exchanged without an issue. Now surprisingly the circuit worked correctly provided with one issue, the period of the sine wave was extremely short. To fix this issue the capacitor was exchanged with one that held roughly double the amount of power getting the effect that was wanted. With a working board completed it was time to make a PCB variation of the design. First the layout of the breadboard was copied into a CAD program. Next the layout was optimized so that it had a small footprint. After the design was completed a cnc mill, a machine that uses coordinate based inputs and performs cuts with high precision and accuracy, was used to engrave the circuit onto a copper board. Eight circuits were engraved onto the board, six for the trophies and two for prototyping. These circuits were then divided into their own separate boards with the help of a band saw. With the base PCB boards finished, I started soldering the components to one of the prototype boards. Once all of the components were attached I connected the power expecting it to work exactly like the