WHAP, Frisbee, and Bad Food... (5/21)

You woke up in the morning at 08:00 for a scheduled meeting with the team at your house to practice the MLTI presentation. Unfortunately, only Nick was able to make it.

In the morning you spend some time connecting the Razor IMU to the BeagleBone and reading data from it. After doing that, you and Nick re-read over the presentation and delegated slides.

At around 11:40 you and Nick headed over the the Community Library to take the AP World History (affectionately called WHAP) exam. You started around 12:15 and spend the next 3 hours writing essays and answering multiple choice questions dealing with "big picture" questions. After the exam you waited for your brother (and his friends) to be dropped off at the library. Once they were dropped off you were going to head to the Frisbee game.

Your mom dropped off the boys and the sandwiches. You then carpooled with Nick, Ben, Bryce, and Quinton to your frisbee game against Scarborough.

The game went well. Although you had a few dropped passes, you played well and made up for it in other plays.

Upon returning home, you, Nick, and Liam finalized the MLTI presentation and then parted. You were very excited for an Indian dinner with Jessica, but unfortunately you got sick. It seems that the Subway had been bad....you ended up spending all night sick and fortunately felt well enough in the morning to go the the MLTI conference.

PVC and heat sinks (5/20)

Today you woke up fairly early and headed down to Baxter with the whole group. When you arrived you were asked/forced to give an impromptu presentation about Project RoboGoby to Mr. Amory's class. After the class was over you headed to the computer lab with Mr. Amory and worked out how to fit the LEDs and their heat sinks into the dome, turns out the best solution is placing the lenses into the actual dome.

You then created a quick CAD model of a jig to cut out PVC, created the MasterCam code and cut out plywood using the CNC router. It was amazing how quickly the router cut out the part, and I realized that the hardest part of machining things is setting up the code and getting the piece to be perfectly in line before cutting.

After that you headed to Portland Pie for pizza, and then worked a short time more at Baxter. You then headed to frisbee with everyone but Josef (as well as Ben and Bryce Schmidt and Quinton). At frisbee you again worked on the new stacks that you came up with.

You then went home and cleaned up for the NHS induction ceremony – as a NHS officer you got to swear in next years NHS students. After that you went to Travis's house and completed the jigs for the PVC.

(Unfortunately this post is two days late as you forgot the night of and felt sick last night)

Baxter

Today you woke up at 07:30 and got ready to head down to Baxter Academy in Portland. At Baxter you planned on meeting with Mr. Amory (your field advisor) to talk about creating the heatsink and creating the jig for the PVC piping. At around 8:45 you left with in one car, and the others left in another. In Portland you stopped briefly at the Post Office with your brother to submit an application for a passport. After doing that, you headed to Baxter.

When you arrived at the school you gave a quick presentation on Project RoboGoby and then went to work with Mr. Amory in the computer lab. While in the computer lab you figured out a few things. First you, Nick, and Mr. Amory decided to push the LEDs to the front on the dome (and therefore have to black "walling" to bock the light from reflecting inside of the dome). You also thought of an easy way to create a heatsink+light combination that was easy to replace. Basically, the LED will be attached to a copper rectangle which will then be attached to a larger heatsink. The heatsink+light unit will then be bolted onto the lens which sits embedded in the plastic dome of the submersible.

While at Baxter you spent a while looking at different waterproof connectors trying to find the best connector for power transfer to the sub. After looking for a while you settled on using a connector from Bucaneer (you found a great deal on EBay).

After choosing the connector to helped Liam and Nick finish up working with the PVC. You then went to lunch at Portland Pie. After lunch, you worked a little more and then left Baxter with Quinton, Ben, Bryce, Liam, and Nick to head to frisbee.

At frisbee you taught Ben and Bryce the Dice, YKK, and Ho-Stack plays. After that you practiced zone defense more by scrimmaging the entire practice. After frisbee you headed over to swimming...although you delayed your arrival by talking about the project and only had to swim for 45 minutes.

After swimming you headed home. At home you got the SSC150 depth sensor working on the BeagleBone Black. After that you purchased another BeagleBone (this one for the sub). Nick then came over after the NHS induction ceremony. You drilled some holes in the jig (pictured below) and decided to email Mr. Amory to ask about machining the PVC.

After Nick left you spent a little over and hour editing the MLTI presentation.

Blog Posts and Python

Today you wok up at 7:30 and headed to the High School. You sat in the library, writing up a few different blog posts on a number of different things. You wrote about MPlayer and Netcat, the DS18B20 on the BeagleBone, and camera streaming methods. Around 10:00 (and a lot of blog posts later), you headed to the FPAC lobby to be interview by Emily Morang for her senior project. The interview went well. After the interview you talked with Mrs. Donovan about Project RoboGoby and then talked with Seth briefly about the MLTI conference. Mrs. Donovan also shows you this AWESOME video of a Michael Jackson hologram at the Billboard Music Awards (with commentary...):

After finishing up at the High School you, Josef, and Nick headed to your house at around 11:45. At your house you finalized the Python/Java server combination (which was awesome!) and then you fixed the Battery.py file. You also worked on integrating the new server into the code you had already written. After spending a few hours working (and a little bit of time eating), you, Josef, Liam, and Nick headed to frisbee practice.

Frisbee practice was at a perfect time. There was no rain and little wind. After frisbee practice you headed to swimming. Swimming was tiring and you were extremely hungry the entire time...and couldn't stop thinking about Indian food. After swimming you dropped Nick's bike off at his house and headed home. You spend the next couple of hours eating dinner, studying WHAP, throwing darts, emailing people, and reading up on Python module packaging.

All in all it was a good, productive day.

You're very excited to finally cut our the heat-sinks/PVC at Baxter tomorrow!

Slidshow prep

You woke up around 0800 today and studied some WHAP. Then headed to school at 1030 to meet up with the group and talk to Ms. Donovan. You also talked with Seth about the MLTI conference.

You then headed back to Travis's where you created a slideshow for thursday's MLTI conference. This meant looking back on the year and pulling out the important parts and lessons. You collected and chose pictures for the slideshow so that it had more media than just writing.

You tried making a custom theme with either the Limbeck Logo or Project RoboGoby but found it to be too obtrusive to be at all useful.

You then went to frisbee where you worked on stacks and got pretty good results. Finally you studies WHAP again in the evening, added to the presentation, and played some DND to relax/blow off steam. You also made plans to go down to Baxter tomorrow.

Dish mount and more LED work

You had another pretty successful day today. You woke up around 0730 and then went to Bob Moore's house to do yard work (he had purchased your silent auction item of yard work). You were accompanied by Sydney Ambrose, Liam Wade, and Travis Libsack.

After working until 1045 you headed back to your house. You cleaned your room, studied a little bit of WHAP and waited until the next meeting for the project at 1400. When that time rolled around Liam showed up and you guys built another part of the float.

You created a mount for the communication dish that will be stationed on the float. The challenge was to make it so that the dish could rotate (allowing it to always face the other dish), but not crush the servo that is supposed to drive it. You finished around 1730 and Liam headed out.

Then after dinner you headed to Travis's to make mock-ups of the dome with LEDs and cameras. This was helpful to an extent, and you guys think you have finally found the best solution for the LEDs. The solution calls for the LED heat sink to take the place of the dome where it is located so that there is no glare and no black plexiglass needed.

Weekend 2: Only the Beginning

You woke up today and headed over to Bob Moore's house to work in his yard. He previously had won you (and some of your friends) at a school auction. After pulling out barbells for a few hours, you got a ride to Nick's house and drove the truck back home. At home you worked on your own yard for a few hours and then had some lunch. After lunch, you took a shower and then started work on the project.

You first fixed the Socket Servers which took about two hours. After completely re-writing the servers, you think that they're all set. You take a break from intensive python and get the DS18B20 temperature sensor woking on the BeagleBone. You also try out the battery monitor. The values from the ADC read seem to be jumping all over the place...you think that it's either a bad connection to the battery or the BeagleBone is just bad at reading analog values.

Temp Sensor and BeagleBone

You finish with the servers and temperature sensors/battery around 17:00. You then start writing a few different blog posts (C920 Camera, temp sensor, battery, etc.). At around 18:25 you head outside to cook the steak you're having for dinner. At around 19:30 Nick comes over and you spec out the different camera designs. After finding the field of vision of the camera and physically setting up a camera scenario, you know the design needs to be changed.

Nick worked on perfecting the CAD design while you added to the sensor-reading python code and purchased the final materials (hopefully) needed to finish up the project. At around 22:30 Nick left, and you finished up work for the day.

You also have realized that this weekend is just the beginning of a very, very long week.