Throughout the past 5 months, I have learnt a lot that has helped prepare me for my future career. It has been a great experience working in a business and being involved in the work process.
WordPress
I have developed my WordPress skills significantly since I started, learning how to use appropriates themes and personalise them to suit my needs, and the functions of different plugins. Developing demo sites has massively helped me with experimenting what and what not to do when creating websites, and has given me confidence with creating my own website in the future.
These are a few of the demo sites I have worked on, which includes a construction placeholder website, a barber shop placeholder website which I worked on with Shahzaib, and my own personal coding course website.
3D Printer
Experimenting with the 3D Printer has been a fun learning experience, which we have built up our knowledge of it throughout the past 5 months. We have printed out different types of models, such as: cubes, flexible cats, phone holders, a dragon, and some models that are designed by us.
We have used different filament materials and colours throughout this placement. We have used colours such as: black, dark blue, pink, red, multi coloured gradients, and a shiny blue.
GitHub Websites
I have also developed HTML, CSS and JavaScript code during my time here for websites using Visual Studio Code and resources from the VWC GitHub. This involves ideas such as: a random website idea generator, website template downloader, and a WordPress helpful tips plugin.
I now feel much more confident with advancing my career in tech, as I have learnt a lot more of making websites and creating my own portfolio website. I have also seen how businesses run and how to manage and work with clients.
We have decided to further advance our 3D prints into a more colourful variety of models.
We have tried different types of filament for 3DA. So far, we have tried a multi-coloured material, a shiny blue material, and recently a pink material that also has a shine to it.
We have also expanded on the different type of objects we are printing. This involves more complex and detailed models, and also larger models. The baby dragon is the most complex object that we have printed, and the cat bowl is the largest that has been printed.
To advance even further, we wanted to design our own model to print, so we decided to create a square that has our logo engraved on it. This was accomplished using the software Inkscape and FreeCAD.
After making adjustments to the bed height of the printer, and the configuration settings of the media files, we have taken steps forward by being able to print more complex models.
We have so far 3D printed a model of a flexible cat which took 9 hours to print, and a hollow Easter egg that took 6 hours.
For future models, we are looking to print a cube that has the logo of our website engraved on the model. We are also looking to use more colours in future prints.
Learning how to use 3DA has been a challenging, yet fun experience. To start off with, we have printed out small cubes to help us learn how the machine actually works, and what can go wrong.
So far we have created a small Lego action figure, and a small kitten as our more advanced shaped objects.
A roadblock we keep on facing is an error that occurs with 3DA that makes the extruder bump into the object, which causes the shape of the object to be ruined. You can see an example of this with the far right object on the image above.
