Under the tutelage of Dr. Stephen Sweigart, students at Johns Creek High School in Johns Creek, Georgia have used their engineering talents and 3D printer to create “Jarvis”, their school robot. For the last decade, Dr. Sweigart has utilized a Stratasys uPrint SE 3D printer after seeing its potential when he first learned about 3D printing. While his 3rd and 4th year engineering students produced the robot and its software functions, Dr. Sweigart sees Jarvis as the latest in a line of burgeoning production thanks to the integration of 3D printing in his lesson plan.
“The incorporation of 3D printing has allowed me to evolve my lessons in many ways. As an architecture teacher, I was able to bring students’ three dimensional drawings into fruition for them. Never before could they hold in their hand one of their drawings. In engineering it has expanded my curriculum tremendously. Not only are we able to make individual parts for a project we are building, we are now able to develop complete projects just using the 3D printer.”
Sweigart became aware of building a robot with 3D printing from an article on inmoov, but his students had been quite active flexing their engineering muscles prior to the newest innovation. Students at Johns Creek produced a “Rube Goldberg” machine, a waterwheel, and an automated drink dispenser among others. The newest model struts as a bit of a peacock among other projects due to its uniqueness and its delivery of school news. The Georgia high school student body lives in a world previously only envisioned in science fiction. The project did not come to fruition overnight and it took more than a year of testing and modification to get the details and function right.
“We started the project with six year-four engineering students that had varying backgrounds in Arduino, Solidworks, project management, etc. These students started the project and got to name him [Jarvis]. The name stuck and the project expanded from there. This year Patrick Shin, a year-three engineering student, has taken on Jarvis and has moved him to new heights. He has designed new parts to add to him, added a third Arduino board and a lot of custom code,” Dr. Sweigart explains. “Most of Jarvis is 3D printed. In addition to the printed parts you will find 23 servo motors, 3 running myrobotlab and is powered by a 42 amp hour 6-volt battery”.
Dr. Sweigart extols hard work and his students see the results possible by learning from failures. The final product speaks for itself, and Tony Stark would approve.
Source: Stratasys
