Calit2 + Final Day -Paul Deardorff

Today was the final day for the mini-sculptures, with a little preparation time tomorrow before the presentation. There was not a lot of stress or worry in the room because most teams were very efficient and well organized in their projects. All of the teams finished the main structures and had just a little bit of last minute programming.

Our team's mini-sculpture is completely finished, including programming and the poster. As promised, I took some action pictures of the ball in motion.

This one of the ball passing through the optical sensor.


One of the ball going through the ramp.


As a special field trip, we toured the Calit2 building for one hour. We first went to a circuitry lab where they worked on robotics, communications, and data research. They had small R/C toys mounted with GPS, wireless cameras, speakers, microphones, and other data gathering instruments. The designs were fairly simple and mostly stock, but the equipment used was more complex. We also saw an amazing 3D CNC milling machine.

We then traveled to a wall of Dell lcd monitors. It was amazing and the possibilities for using the technologies were endless. It was impressive enough to even draw the attention of several Google representatives who were inspecting the display.

Here is a picture:
Each set of four Dell monitors was hooked up to a single Dell XPS system which was then controlled by a single computer to divide up the monitor display.

I was very happy that we were able to have this field trip on special request of the cluster! It was definitely worth the time out of class because I really enjoyed it.

Best Regards,

Paul Deardorff