Today was a cool and rainy day.. Diane painted the whole day.. I dropped in and out of painting assignments. I also took some time working on the monster project and got a good start on a paper I have due in two weeks.. Here’s an interesting set of stats that I found during my research .. Why aren’t more women entering engineering ? Any ideas.. please let me know !
all in all a pretty good.. if dreary day.
Diane and I managed to get out for a walk this morning. the air was heavy and wet.. the leaves looked pretty cool in the misty air. I think thta was the only time I was out of the house.. no wait, I di drop gabe at a movie this afternoon.. Spotted this tree on the drive back
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I took a few hours this morning to try and make a little more progrss on the Project-x maonster. It’s too bad that we didn’t get the head this weekend.. this was to have been our main integration weekend. i’m not sure when I’m going to have enough time to devote to it for the rst of the month. That may be a big problem.
I chose to spend my time this morning rebuilding the arduino board that handles the mouth and the eyes. The current board had been built by sequentially adding new features.. at this point many of the features.. eg. eyebrow motor control, computer control of the air solenoids were no longer needed… but their circuitry was still clogging up the board. There was so much old stuff on there that it would be hard to extend, hand hard to debug.
Here’s the old board..
Here’s me building up the new board.. with the help of the magnifier I now have to use.. @^$ eyesite’s shot.
Here’s the new alonsite the old.. May not look much differnt, but beleive me it’s much simpler and claaner .
2. Who else was involved (knowingly or not!) in what happened for you on that effort today? (Please don’t forget to include ST chats, email exchanges, etc.)
Hmmm .. I spoke with Homer about not getting together today.. without the head, there wasn’t much we could do… We’re goign to have to do soem late nights this week I guess. I also spoke with my good friend Scott today about life, inventing etc. He has been doing some really cool stuff with lasers.. He’s got his C02 laser running and burning stuff… and now he’s messing around with blue/uv diode lasers salvaged from fast DVD writers. Here’s a picture he took today of the UV laser causing a uranium glass marble to glow… beautiful !
3. In general, do you feel more optimistic or more concerned about the potential / likely success of this effort today than yesterday? Why?
I’m starting to panic a bit with the work stuff I have. my paper and project-x.. It used to be that panic helped me get stuff done.. now it just makes me…. panic.
4. Please take a picture of something (anything) that is suggestive of this effort in any way that is meaningful to you…. (or draw one).
Here’s somethign that I think most folks can relate to:.. you start a project.. find a piece of equipment that you need.. notice it needs soem repair.. so you start working on that.. find that you need a tool to fix it.. look for the tool and find that it needs repair… etc, etc.. Here I am takign apart an old bench supply I need to run the monster’s servo jaw.. it had a broken terminal.. so here I am doing surgery on it.. that was an hour I hadn’t planned on spending..
5. Did anything hinder your innovativeness today ?
Mismatch of schedule, . buckets of paint, heaviness of heart.
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