Janurary 18th, 2010: Day #10- Holiday Workday

January 18th. Holiday. That’s right, we’re here on a holiday, ‘cause that’s how we roll! Since the beginning of the day, Deepa and I have been working on taking the Mug shots for the Trading Cards. Seeing as we couldn’t find a whiteboard, we (meaning I) came up with a totally ingenious idea of holding up a white cutting board and using a projector to display the person’s nickname. My nickname, which is totally accurate, was L33T. While Deepa and I were working on taking pictures, Sheila, David, and Sean Weaver were working on drawing the Pit on Inventor. Jeff and his dad were working on the Ball Magnet in the Workshop next to our room. Jeff, interviewed on this, said “It works better than I would have thought it would.” His proof of concept actually proved the ball handling mechanism works! Actually, he’s about a week ahead of his schedule. He also thinks because of being ahead, something is going to go wrong. Programming, in the third room that we have access to, was working on camera acquisition and getting said image onto the Classmate. Public Relations also worked on the trading cards, but they were working on the background and biographies that went into them. They even made “mock FBI files” to put the pictures in. And now, for the pizza buffet!
Lunch came at some point today. In the spirit of past lunches, we had pizza! And, to go with the pizza, like the other days, we had soda and cookies too. Ashwyn took the only time we’re all together to introduce the new Mustang Logo. Most everyone liked it, but I personally thought it looked like the mecanum wheels. Then, social half hour was over. Back to work we all went.
Back to work we went. Jeff tested his surgical kicker, and, sadly, it did not work as planned. The idea and concept was fine, but he just couldn’t get enough power out of it. That made us all really sad. We believe that adding the pneumatics to it should help, but we have not been able to test that idea yet. Sean Boeck worked on making up a scouting spread sheet, pit scouting, and an instructions sheet. And, because I’m awesome like that, I even got a suggestion in for the scouting sheet. (That suggestion was adding a “Autonomous Mode Y/N” file.) Programming worked on the same thing in the afternoon as they were in the morning: Writing a program for the camera and the pneumatics. As Ashwyn so wisely put it: “We’ve been having some technical difficulties with it.”
All in all, we had a really productive day, and if we can get days as productive as today in the future, we’ll be set.

Pictures of the day: