Diane just came back from a quick trip back to Binghamton. She was helping to clean out.. and say goodbye .. to her grandmother and uncles house. Come to think of it.. it was her house at one time.. she lived there until she was one.
Diane came back with carful of interesting stuff from those two houses.. My vaforite is one of her grandfather Constantine’s original oak wine barrels .. Check these out !
it’s quite dried out.. but I’m wondering if I wet it carefully whether it would seal back up.. It would be very cool to make something alcoholic to refill this beauty
we also got some cool odds and ends including a nail bucket, some old boxes and Constantine’s personal wrench
nice to have this stuff to remember all those cool folks.. .. our house it getting more and more full of stuff like that..
Tonight was the annual Engineering Night at the University of Vermont. All the seniors were there showing off their end of year capstone projects. It was magnificent !
Gabe spent a few minutes lookign around with me util he had to run off and take a test… Heres a project some of his friends did.. very cool way to help train nordic skiers.. they created instrumented ski polls. they embedded strain gauges in both poles. and fed those into a n arduino with wireless link in each handle.. they would then measure the stress on both poles and report if the skier was favoring one side or another.. The skier got an audible clue in her/his ear to tell them that they were favoring one side
heres friend Paulos mars lander.. they are entering this thing in a completion .. looked pretty impressive !
my overall favorite was the electric tractor done by my friend Caitlin and friends. They took an 194-‘s tractor and retrofit it to electric drive. it was really amazing. a clean an beautiful build !
Great display of creativity and design.. made me proud to be an engineer
.. Do o arrigato- destroy Robotta.. That idiotic song came to mind as my friends new robot buddy smashed into my shins. I was down at Generator for my monday 'geek night' . Lots going on my friend Scott was their building his next Tesla build, matt and toby were there scheming about wire benders, mica was cutting out parts for his lamps on the laser.. And my freinds jeff and tish and their kids were playing wiht their new robot..
I was particulalry happy to see this project. trish works at Mater Christi school. Our friends from Greensea systems had donated a ton of supplies to them for use in their new makerspace… This robot was what came out of that pile of stuff. I contributed the readio control transmitter and receiver and helped them design the int erface to the motor controlers… Jeff and trish did the robot design with the help of the kindergarten through 8th graders.. Its really a work of art…
Id write soem more.. But diane just made dulce de leche using maple syrup and i cant stop eating it
Really sleepy weekend.. normal pattern.. vegging out entirely on Sunday.. then a somewhat agitated ramp up to the week ahead.. I find myself spending hours on Sundays trying to get through my email backlog which kind of undoes all the relaxing I was able to do the day before.. and so it goes..
Gaby came by today which was really nice. He and I stopped in on friend Chris who wanted to show us his new ‘flame effects’ .. they are actually flame throwers.. but flame throwers are illegal in these parts.. or so I’m told.. so these are merely ‘flame effects’ They are very nice !!!
came home from that visit to find this on the back step.. it must be spring already somewhere close !
ok.. not much more to say.. kind of in a quiet mood.. maybe more talkative tomorrow
