Wednesday, February 3. 2010
Another Wednesday. There is just something about Wednesdays!
What we ate for Dinner! Becca’s Mom and Grandma brought in rice and stir-fried chicken and vegetables, served with crunchy noodles and slivered almonds. There was a vegetarian version as well. We also had tossed salad, Mandarin oranges and cherry tomatoes. Dessert was a wide selection of cookies!
The Chairman’s essay group met at 5 to work on trimming our slightly fat essay. There is just so much to cover and so few characters to do it in! Also coming in early was a substantial number of the mechanical group to get started on more detailing, Programmers were already set up an at work before dinner as well. Since I usually don’t make it this early, I had no idea that all this work happened before dinner!
After dinner, the Leadership team had a meeting while the rest of the groups went to work.
Tonight’s count of computers in Inventor: 9 mechanical, 1 electrical and 1 field.
And a new one for us tonight, Quentin learned that the Technology computers have Illustrator! He used that program to work on tweaking the t-shirt design. The deadline is very tight at this point, but the new design is worth giving it just one more day! I spent some time with him trying to find the perfect font. Who knew there were so many to choose from?
The drive-train group started to work on the bumpers tonight.
The controls group was “ohm-ing” it out, as they worked to prepare a ribbon cable to go from a USB port on the control box to the circuit board. Somehow the process involved wearing little mustaches.
For the field sub-team, the memory foam is quickly becoming only a memory as all of the pieces have been attached to their goal backings and covered with spandex. Being thrifty, we have reused the leftover pieces from making orbit balls for last year’s Rally and Ruckus. This means the goals are lined with various colors: red, white, black and orange.
Mentor Tom C. found a new shelving unit for the closet to replace a plastic one that was there. Mr. Brewer and Mr. Weisbrod stopped by late in the evening to review with Team Leader Larry some of the equipment they are trying to purchase for the shop (which will be available next year for us.)
Update from the programming team! The CAN bus is a CAN! But as far as code goes, they are still meeting with limited success in completing their programming tasks. Mentor Jeff was reviewing code and kept muttering about reticulating splines. What?!? Search for it he says. So here it goes… “Reticulating Splines: Constructing network based functions that are defined by divisible intervals while approximating said network and composing it of pieces of simple functions defined on subintervals and joined at their endpoints with a suitable degree of smoothness. ” Did you get that? So what are “reticulating splines”? A programmer’s joke. Jeff – is this why Shauna calls you “Evil Face?” (The best part is that Jeff doesn’t read the blog, so he’ll never see this!)
End of the day mechanical update. Part files have been transmitted to Harris for 7-9 parts. The stock that was ordered has arrived and we will be starting to prep it tomorrow. Now that’s progress!
