Today was another great day of working on our mini-Kinetic Sculpture project. My main focus for the team was autoCAD and BASIC (programming). This is the area which I am most comfortable in, but I also help in building and design because it is always good to help out with a little bit of everything. Having never used Basic before, I had to just jump in and try and work things out. After a lot of testing, re-coding, guessing, and LOTs of help from the professors and teacher assistants, my program is almost where I want it to be for Friday, the big presentation. The main problem with my programming was that it was actually controlling physical actions and commands performed by various sensors and motors. As we know, occurances in the "real world" do not always happen as they do on a computer. Most of my programming experience is in languages like HTML and JAVA which are very different from Basic. I, however, really enjoyed working with this new language because it was interesting to physically see the code and instructions to be performed in real time which I had just written on the computer. After some work in the lab, we had a very informative lecture on presenting, teamwork, and organization. Eventually, we will be making a poster board for the mini Sculpture with annotated pictures/diagrams to convey our projects and explain the challenges faced with creating them. One of the most important ideals in engineering/science (and also other fields) is presenting becasue that is what makes you heard in the real world. If a project you are working on is not communicated or documented properly, it will be of no use to other researchers in that field. The type of work we are doing in our cluster will be very important to each one of us in our future career and life activities. We ended the day with some fun activities. I just walked around and observed each one because I had some summer reading to finish.
Some pictures from today's lab work:
Our team's mini-Sculpture in its almost current status. Some rebuilding required for the joystick module and mount. You can see the new mount hot off the LaserCAMM in the far right of the picture.
Some testing of the ball ramp done by the careful hands of Harsh.
Me inspecting the equipment and noticing a need for a new joystick mount! Luckily, I have autoCADD, a LaserCAMM, and a full machine shop all in the same building (almost same room!)
After a new design, some measurements (thanks KJ for help with that!), a little drilling, and 4.67 minutes on the Lasercamm, our team has a new mount!
Thanks for looking!
Paul Deardorff
P.S. - Tomorrow I will take some action shots of all these pieces put together. I will try to get the ball rolling through the ramp as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment