Back to COSMOS! -Paul Deardorff

After an incredibly refreshing family visitation weekend, I am back and ready to start where I left off at COSMOS! Today was a great day, we worked out some more programming issues and building problems the first part of the morning on our Mini-Kinetic Sculptures. I learned some new programming techniques such as sub-routines, more on FOR loops, and also some digital/analog inputs. I was able to implement a control stick for the kinetic sculpture. Maybe I will post a video of it later when it is finished. After lunch, we had a fun lecture on the physics of a ball dropping where you find the distance from the point of release and the point in which the ball hits the ground with a constant X velocity and linear increasing speed in the Y direction. We then put this theory to test by doing some lab experiment/calculations in the lab room. It turns out the theory is proven! (maybe it should become a law). With a minimal error (I calculated 20%) the data was fairly accurate, but had many uncontrolled factors (friction, movement, etc.).

I have some more pictures from today.

Some programming, which was the job I was mainly focusing on. The command [12] clears the LCD screen and [13] skips to the next line. We also learned servos, digital/analog inputs, optical sensors, and good programming practices.


Some testing on the Kinetic Sculpture: (I need to adjust my shutter speed!)


Also,

A new update to the websites of COSMOS is up. Most of the team pages are up.

Here is my page which I just finished hand-coding in Notepad using HTML: (very tiring!)

http://www.maeprojects.ucsd.edu/cosmos/summer2008/team1/

and also the navigation page for all of the teams:

http://www.maelabs.ucsd.edu/cosmos/teams/index.html

Thanks for looking and enjoy~!

Paul Deardorff

P.S.- I can't wait for the discovery lecture tomorrow! Its going to be great!