Posted by Dustin Patterson in College, Projects, tags: 2009, classes, electronics, Fall, Multisim, PCB, printed circuit board, Project, Projects, UND, University of North Dakota, wiring
My first featured project for Fall 2009 is an electronic quiz box that I produced in my Tech 201 class at UND. For the project, we were to design a circuit that would allow a question to be answered but pushing a button and then the corresponding LED would light either red or green, depending on whether the question was answered correctly. If the question was answered incorrectly, there is a buzzer that will also sound. The test administrator then needs to have the option to change what button is the correct answer, along with changing the corresponding incorrect answers.
 Top view of the circuit As you can see in the above image, the red push buttons on the left side are used to answer the question, lighting the corresponding LED on the right side. The toggle switches in the middle allow for changing the correct and incorrect responses.
 Side view of the circuit Above is another angle of the circuit. All of the parts are connected to a printed circuit board that I made. The PCB is shown below.
 Printed Circuit Board (PCB) for the circuit The above PCB was my first experience with circuit board etching. The estimated time to produce just the circuit board is about 1 hour. After the board is made and the holes are drilled, the individual parts can then be soldered to the board.
The soldered components and board were then placed into a 4″ x 6″ plastic box. Holes were drilled in the box to accommodate for the LEDs and push button switches.
Below are a couple of pictures of the box and circuit in action.
 Correct answer = Green LED, No Buzzer  Wrong Answer = Red LED, Buzzer Sounds Well that concludes this project. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please post them in the comments below.
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Well it’s that time of year again: The days are cooler, the leaves have fallen off, and the semester is half over. With the middle of the semester comes the one of the busiest times for classes. Depending on your chosen major, you may be taking tests, writing papers, experimenting in the lab, or working on hands-on projects. Being an Industrial Technology major at UND, we focus on the latter and that means it’s time to update the blog. Be sure to check back in the next few weeks as I begin to wrap some projects up and post some updated content.
While waiting for a new posts, be sure to checkout some of my projects from Spring 2009.
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Posted by Dustin Patterson in Misc, Pictures, tags: 3d, ACDC, autocad, beta theta pi, Cummings, fighting sioux, frank lloyd wright, Grizzly, house, Industrial Technology, lathe, mill, north dakota, prairie style, router, ShopBot, steam engine, UND, wood
Friday was the last day of the spring semester at UND. With it comes the end to class and the beginning of summer fun. I know that I haven’t written any real content for my website in some time now, so I hope this post will get me back to writing more. In this post I cover some select projects from select Industrial Technology classes.
Industrial Technology Classes
IT 202
In January I had my first experience with 3D capabilities of AutoCAD. Although it may seem intimidating, 3D drawings in AutoCAD are very enjoyable. For my Midterm Project I was to draw a 3D model of a Prairie Style house. [More information on Prairie style houses and Frank Lloyd Wright cab be found here.] Some renderings of this project can be seen below.
After the completion of our Midterm project, we were immediately assigned the final project. We were required to design a 5 acre yard for our recently designed house. The yard was to contain some standard features, along with some of our own features. When the project was complete, I had exactly 39 hours, 40 minutes into it. (Total is Midterm and Final projects combined.) Although it didn’t turnout exactly as I had wanted it too, I am still happy with the final outcome.
IT 203
My other interesting class of the semester was IT 203, Manufacturing Processes. In this class we were shown the basic processes of manufacturing, using a lathe and mill. After watching the “boring videos”, learning equipment safety, and performing some simple operations, it was time to learn hands-on. Our only project for IT 203 was to manufacture all of the parts necessary to build a small scale steam engine. By completing this project, we were exposed to many operations in manufacturing.
Many different pieces of manufacturing equipment were used for this project including:
- Grizzly Mill
- Old Bridgeport Mill
- Cummings Lathe
- Clausing Lathe
 Grizzly Mill  Cummings Lathe Completed engine parts
 Completed Engine Parts Completed engine
 Completed Engine After the engine has been graded and returned to me, I will post some video of it running.
Other Industrial Technology Projects
During the past semester I received my first instruction in CNC equipment. The Manufacturing Lab at UND has a ShopBot CNC router similar to the one pictured below.
As simple introductory projects we designed and cutout wood signs. These wood signs contained a combination of 2D images and 3D text. The process is very simple: Draw sign in AutoCAD, import into ShopBot software, and generate the tool paths that the router will understand. Then sit back and watch your work be created for you.
Below are a couple of images of signs that I created.
 AC/DC Wood Sign  Beta Theta Pi Wood Sign Conclusion
Each of the above classes were simply introductory classes in each of their subject areas. As I am only a little ways into the Industiral Technology program at UND, I can expect several more projects with increasing levels of complexity to come in the future. I hope that you enjoyed reading this post and I hope to have more like it in the future.
Please let me know your thoughts on the projects or anything else in the comments.
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As many of you may have heard in the news recently, the Red River Valley in North Dakota and Minnesota has been flooding for the past couple of weeks. The cities of Fargo/Moorehead and Grand Forks/East Grand Forks have been experiencing 100 year flooding levels for the second time in 12 years.
Although television and radio have been the standard means of communication, the micro-blogging service Twitter has helped to keep citizens informed of the current flood levels and river situations. These Twitter accounts, along with websites from the NOAA and webcams setup by local newspapers, have helped to keep the citizens of the Red River Valley informed with the most up-to-date information.
Below is the list of sites and Twitter accounts that I have found useful when following the Red River Flood conditions.
Below are other links that I have not used, but may be useful to others.
Have you used any of the above sites for monitoring the flood conitions? What sites or services to you prefer? Let me know by commenting below.
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Posted by Dustin Patterson in Pictures, tags: 2009 flood, fargo, flooding, Grand Forks, minnesota, north dakota, red river, red river flood, red river of the north, river floods
A link to some great pictures of the flooding along the Red River in North Dakota.
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Below are pictures of some of my completed projects of my introductory AutoCAD class at UND.
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Posted by Dustin Patterson in Hardware, Software, Technical Articles, tags: beta, beta theta pi, firmware, internet, linksys, linux, polar cloud, router, tomato, tomato transmit power, wrt54g
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I originally came across the above error when I was removing a virus from an individual’s computer. The virus I was removing was known as one of the Facebook viruses. The way the virus is spread is when an individual clicks on a link in a message that they received from a Facebook friend. When they click the link, it bring them to a YouTube lookalike and asks them to download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. Of course, the file that they are download is not Flash Player, but indeed a virus.
In this specific case, the user received an email from Facebook stating that they detected that their Facebook account was used to spread the virus, and gave the user information on removing the virus. Their instruction were very successful overall.
When I received the users computer, I noticed that Windows Updates were not on, and the computer was very out-of-date. I downloaded Windows XP Service Pack 3 and began the installation. About half way through, I received the following error:
“Access is Denied” error when installing Windows XP Service Pack 3
I used my friendly search engine, Google to find the solution.
The above error occurs when there are incorrect Registry permissions on the computer. In reading further, I found that although I was using Administrator access, the registry permissions were independent of that. Microsoft provided a Knowledge Base article which game the necessary information to reset the Registry permissions.
1. Download this file (from Microsoft’s servers)
This will install the necessary back end for the next step.
2. Copy and paste the following into a new text file and name it reset.cmd
cd /d “%ProgramFiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools”
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%\*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose
3. Save the file, reset.cmd, to the Desktop.
4. Double-click the file. This may take a while to run, so be patient.
5. When it is finished, restart your computer for good luck and you should be able to install Service Pack 3 without any problems.
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Well after being down for a little while, I’m finally back. My web host has been making changes to the web servers, including adding more PHP security and increasing overall server stability.
I’ve recently moved back to Grand Forks, where I have started my 3rd year as a student at the University of North Dakota. I moved into my fraternity house, Beta Theta Pi, and am currently holding the positions of Secretary and Webmaster.
Around June of this past summer, our website was hacked and the Home page was defaced. This was more then likely caused by a vulnerability in either an outdated PHP calendar or news feed. I recently did an update of the home page with some basic information for now. Soon, WordPress will be integrated. This will allow all positions of the house to update their portions of the website without any problems.
More to come.
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Well UPS delivered my package around 1PM today.
I immediately installed my new 1 GB of RAM into my T42p.
After installing my new RAM, I began to unpackage the new Linksys WRT54GL that I also purchased. Upon starting the router for the 1st time, I immediately downloaded the newest version of the Tomato Firmware.
I upgraded without and problems. I then set the information for my connection, along with a couple of static IPs for the computers around the house, and am off!
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