The End of Senior Project

Deadline was coming up. We needed a final prototype in less than a month, coded and moving before the senior symposium where everyone presented their projects.

Since then, I have gotten familiar and tuned ABS to my Ender 3. Ever since I got it, I’ve always printed PLA because I didn’t have an enclosure and slept next to my printer. As of March, my printer has been running in a LACK enclosure with air scrubber.

I had just reprinted my Ender 3’s extruder head with a Hero Me upgrade out of ABS. Now it’s ready to reprint all the components and finalize the prototype.

The solar array teams have also received additional feedback from the JPL advisors throughout the quarter. One major advice for us is to improve on the photoresistor mounting, as before there is no clear distinction between in/out of alignment with sun. Noticeable with how it struggled to track light well but this slight recessed angle did help a bit.

We also received the nylon gears which worked extremely well. The internal planetary gear had to be FDM printed but we did not see any of the friction we saw before. I put heat inserts into it without a fume extractor, which was a bad decision bc it smelled so horrible, and from then on always carried my solder fan.

I had soldered on all the photoresistors into a thick cable bundle with hook-up wire, tucked it against the solar panel frame. And done.

Physical prototype was done. Since I was quite strong in Arduino already, I left coding to the members who wanted to get better at it and gave some advice / fixes as needed. The work balance might be a little skewed but honestly, as long as everyone learned something or if me taking work off their load for other obligations helped them, I was okay with it. I did check in with everyone about how they felt afterwards because I did feel a bit bad about it.

Though when you look at the other teams, even amongst the solar array groups, we were one of the only ones to actually make a prototype achieve our goals or move for that matter.

Actually, the symposium was earlier than the final report and JPL presentation and I felt the JPL presentation was a lot more important than this symposium. So you can see here the PLA prototype and the ABS parts I printed that will eventually be soldered and reassembled afterwards. If I was lazy, I would’ve just left it as is but my perfectionism kicked in.

I am very grateful for my team. We kept up organization to the best we could and collaborated a lot, keeping communication as open as possible despite me speeding ahead and perhaps loss of effort or communication for others.

I made the rest of the team a mini solar array spinner as a souvenir out of the leftover parts.

[October 2025] Looking back at old photos, I should try to reprint the assembly with my printer again and have it autonomously rotate. Another project for another time…