ELECTRONIC DESIGN STUDIO 2006

Electronic Design Studio is a workshop run for year 11 science students to give them a hands on introduction to designing, building and testing electronic modules.

The project chosen for 2006 is a weather station and the remote sensors.

The idea of making a weather station was to provide the students schools with a usefull resource as well as giving the students an introduction to electronic engineering.. We decided to use the Picaxe microcontrollers due totheir low cost, as all students taking part in the Design Studio get to keep all of the parts of their project, ease of programming and excellent support and documentation through the Revolution Education Picaxe site.

The first day of the workshop involves assembley, testing and programming of the Picaxe experimentors module .There is a safety induction and a soldering video before assembly can begin. Go to the module for a description of how the circuit works, troubleshhoting guide and sample Picaxe programs.

The second day introduces students to the process of designing a circuit for a weather station sensor module, laying out a pcb board, making the pcb and soldering the components onto the pcb

We have supplied a 9 volt dc 500mAmp plugpack to power the units to remove the risk of working with a mains power supply. UWA policy requires that all portable electrical equipment is tested and tagged to AS/NZS3760:2003 so we give the participants an introduction to Non Hostile environments and teach them how to visually inspect their plugpacks and then they attach a Visual Inspection tag.