Assembely Line

The

The avarage times of stations in the assemboly line. As you can see, the greatest ammount of time was taken by station one, and the greatest by station 6, which is ours.

Visualising data

Kindles and the future of books

Congratulations. By reading these words you have proved that you are literate. That or you have a text to speech program. In that case get off your lazy ass and learn to read (my apologies to the blind). However, this simple form of reading is the most that the average human does nowadays. I’m not calling you stupid, I’m calling you lazy, but that’s fine, as most are. The vast majority will use their extensive learning ability to read signs or funny blog posts with little informative matter. That’s how things are right now, only reading four or five books a year, probably the same books you read last year.

As the brunt of this post will be discussing how this miraculous little machine changed my life (hand how I believe it will change other’s), it only makes sense to explain to you myself. I love to read. By the age of 14 I had already finished all of Asimov’s science fiction novels, was busy plowing through Clark’s, and was already testing the waters of other writers in anticipation for this current source drying up. I’m not bragging, I’m saying that as a child I read. I read a lot, I read all the time. My teachers complained of my continuous reading. I made significant headway into “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, not that I understood what the hell was going on, I just loved reading so much that I just read it. So of course when I entered high school I went from a hundred books a year to about four. Why? Simple. High school is more difficult, and while I still had plenty of time to read, I felt my time more expensive. I felt it silly to start on a book of unknown quality while I could be studying, or, as it turned out, messing around on the computer, the difference is that it takes more effort to read. A computer is right there, I put in a website, and I stare at it for hours on end until I finish, many websites are never ending, if I enjoy it I simply continue on. If I decide half way I dislike a book, I can not simply hit back and try another, I must run to the library to grab another. Short of maintaining an expansive library —I do in a way, but full of previously-read books—, I saw no way to fix this. The books I did read came from my library, as they were close and I know how good they were. There was, at the time, no solution.

The Kindle is a game changer. All the benefits of the computer, of mucking around on reddit or stumbleupon, but with subsidence. If I dislike a book it takes but a moment to find another. The Kindle itself is smaller and lighter then a conventional book, thus I carry it everywhere. When I complete a book I am not left with a teaser of the next book by the author, but with a list of similar books I may enjoy. It’s stupendous. The Kindle has all the benefits of the computer, but with subsidence. I subside off science fiction. It fuels my mind. The internet gives me entertainment, but a good book makes me think and dream. Additionally, The Kindle is great as you can carry hundreds of books with you at any time. When you desire a specific books you need not search through bookcases, you can just read it. Kindles are not perfect, however. Some fear the downfall of the normal library, of the halls of dust tombs of knowledge. It’s easy to harbor such romantic feelings of this image, library have been in existence since writing was invented. However, technology must progress. Doubtless people lamented the loss of wooden ship in favor of metal, however it was necessary to continue advancement of sailing technology. Same goes for plays; The television made them obsolete. They still exist nonetheless, only in much smaller numbers. In this way physical books will exist, one’s favorite text will share your mantle with your candles and record player, not forgotten but not the star of the show. This is necessarily to keep track with the computer, which has changed us into spontaneous people low zero attention span.

I, too, will lament the loss of our oldest form of physical media. But there is no choice. Adapt or die.

Egg Drop Challenge - Iteration #1

We got 12 achievements!

Its me!

First off, here are our three sketches.

Our list of outside parts was the robotics ball and perhaps styrofoam. In addition, our materials fit cleanly into a paper box. There was a lot of empty space, as shone in the picture. Our project weighted in the vincinity of 250 grams, below the 300 gram mark.
We hit the bullseye, but our egg exploded. no joke.

It would seem as though the winners used Styrofoam for their project, which stopped the egg from dying. If were to do this again, I would have encased the egg in Styrofoam and then in the ball. Hopefully we could have accuracy and egg survival that way, but who knows.

Glider Challenge!

Here is our final glider design; it took a lot of work and many retries, but in the end it worked really really well!

The challenge here was to, ideally, build a glider that went further faster then any one else's. We could only use balsa wood, tissue paper, and hot glue.

Thus we started brainstorming! Firstly the rules, any idea is good, and constructive criticism is welcome, as well as building off others ideas. First I brought out the Helicopter, but no one seemed partial to that. Then we  breifly considered just making a parachute in the hopes no one else's glider would function correctly. We quickly scrapped that idea. Then we figured a big wing is probably best. Then we thought of adding a second smaller wing, but we were unsure if that would help much. Nevertheless, we went with the second.



Knowing that we had to fry far and long, and we could only work with Balsawod and tissue paper, we got to work solidifying our design.

Final, glorious solution

We built a simple airplane, and it worked out great! Then we found our design in balsa wood (BAE systems had handed them out to robotics clubs), and it worked even better!

After constructing our glider we found that it fell to earth fairly well. We desired that it started to fly and would never land. Thus we decided to change the "crashing" part of our designs. The question was how? se we decided to add weight. It worked great! The added weight kept it in the air for much longer. After adjusting the weight many times, we eventually came upon a sweet spot that made the glider fly very well.

Our glider flew very well, beating everyone easily. Thus I would have changed nothing, our glider preformed better then I thought it would.

Ping Pong Ball Shooter

Here is the launcher. I adjust the distance by changing the launch angle. Bring up the red things to launcher further, lower to launch closer

Engineering Capstone Project

Note: When someone changes your password and whatnot as a joke, it takes quite a bit for Google to get around to fixing it for you.

Initially we dove into the project with what looked very much like our finished product. However, we briefly experimented with different designs, ultimately using our final design as it was the quickest and easiest to build.

This is our initial design. A track would move marbles to a power track that would sense the reflected light and move to the correct bin. We quickly discovered that this would take way too long, and thus we quickly forgot about it.

This was thought up to address the speed issues, using pistons to force the marble to roll off at the correct place. We figured this would work fastest so we prototyped this. We quickly discovered that our light bounce off idea doesn't work at all, so we quickly moved on and forgot this idea, as we needed a more creative solution to filter the wood and metal.

 Here we employed the gate idea, which was only high enough to admit the wood and metal marbles, which were later sorted via a magnet. However, it was much much too slow (took about 4 minutes for 15 marbles) and the marble would frequently not fall correctly on the sensing cart, the idea was quickly changed to remove the cart, using the "moving bins" system that Cody pioneered.

Here is our last design, including the last's track design, with the color sensor on the track and the bins moving. We were able to get the time to under two minutes, but marbles would frequently get stuck and fall into the wrong cart. This was later fixed by adding another piston and moving the color sensor, a simple fix that cost us some time.












Decision Matrix

Here is our DM, with the fields "Fast", relating to how fast we could process 15 marbles, "Accurate", how many marbles went into their correct bins, and "Easy", how easy it would be to make this design. At the time we thought that design 4 won all these categories, but we later discovered that design 2 would have been the easiest to build.







Final Design

This is an overview of our design modeled in Blender.  you can see the moving cart system as well as the added piston (Large blocks signify pistons, small ones indicate our color sensing equipment). Nothing much to say here, other then this design proved to be accurate and fast, and quite simple (Although it take much tinkering to make it work correctly).

The added piston removes the sensing from the marble gate, as multiple marbles could get caught in there at a time. This made it much more accurate, and stopped multiple balls from going on the same cycle. We also added a second compressor, which helped a lot as the design took up a top of compressed air.

We accomplished our objectives very well, in my opinion. We had 15 marbles sorted in less then two minutes, and we could cut down that amount drastically via fine tuning, but we did not have enough time to do this. Our solution changed little from our first construction, mostly fine tuning, and changing the cart to a set of bins, for this took much less time and came with its own set of challenges. Additionally, changing the light sensor to measure the amount of light that passes through the ball as opposed to bounces off the ball made it much more accurate, although it bounce off had worked we could have differentiated the marbles only via a light sensor, not with a magnet. Our project very neatly fulfilled the problem statement, as we accomplished all the goals and did so quite elegantly. Although some other designs would have beaten us time wise if given enough time to work out the kinks, ours prevailed on simplicity and ease to build. I learned how to iterate our designs and pull from other people, then adjust these ideas to form new ways to accomplish a task. If I were working alone I doubt that the project would have ended as it did, most notably the moving bins idea from Cody or the marble gate from David. The purpose of this exercise was to learn to design a product, then make it. We did just this, although the project ended up to be designed rather organically without any sort of review session, more “This is an issue, and this is how I think we can fix it”.

Achievement wise I would suggest one fro not using pneumatics (for those parts were in short supply), along with general "uses least parts", and especially one for using few solenoids, for those were rare. Other then that no part became rare that could not be worked around.

Blogger is not allowing me to log in, i will try to fix the issue as soon as possible. Sent via text. Sorry about this

Here I took the inermenting of avariable and split it off into a subprogram. I also added some meters and some more functuality (speed of increase). Subprograms can be used multiple times, so they cut down on compile times, and complexity of the program. Also, if an error developes in the pubprogram it only needs to be fixed in once, instead of in every place you used it.

Variables and Fun!

Here we are adding one to a value five times, once the value hits five we quit the program. Easy enough.

Branch Functions

We are messing with the branch functions available in RoboPro softwhare, in order to learn and apply them.

Branches allow logic to be done. Without branches the program will work with gates, that is once it gets somewher it will wait untill something occurs. With branches, it can go along a different path depending on a variable or the return of a function.

A normally open switch could be used on a segway to only allow power to the drive train when there is someone on the segway.

A normally clossed switch could be used onthe robot as a limit switch. When pressed (By, say and arm reaching its upwardmost point), it could put power to the motors.

Flow Charting

I performed a small exercise in flowcharting in order to get used to the process. It was fairly simple, and it reminded me of programming. Due to my inability to use word software (so expensive!) I used OOo, which proved to not have as many features as word.

Initially I was to pick up an object from a bin and weight it three times:

As you can see some programming slipped in there, as I saw no easier way to do it. Hooray for for loops!

Basically pick up the object and weigh it, then place it in the appropriate bin. Very simple.

Next the code was to be modified to weight 10 objects, not only three. Luckily for me, I used a for loop, which proved quite versatile.

Lastly I had to do some random number calculations, which seemed simple enough. Still felt like programming.

1. How is flowcharting similar to using a map to plan a route for a trip? 

Flowcharts are the path you use in order to arrive at your destination, much like what you get from mapquest. However, mapquest doesn't have if statements, making flowcharting have branches while maps are very linear.

2. Describe a process that you perform every day. Develop a flowchart that illustrates the process.

Here I am flowcharting driving/biking to school each morning. It's fairly simple.

MKS

Various things put in units of length, time, mass etc.

Length==m
Time==s
mass==kg
Area==m^d, where d is the number of dimensions the space has.
Velocity==m/s
Denisty==g/cm^3
Gravity==N
Force==N
Energy==J
Power==W

OPTIN: The Revolution will not be televised, but will be available on youtube.

The Egyptian change in government was not simple and required much work by its populace in order to facilitate the change.  Which really seemed to ignite the protests was shutting down the internet in Egypt, then the power. This may seem to shut off all lines for the protesters to communicate, however the protesters made use of modern technology in order to continue their protests and reach the outside world.

First off, the protests made up of Bluetooth and Ethernet switches, connected to the internet through Satellite internet, in order to stay connected to the outside world. The government shut down all land based internet, leaving only those who had Satellite. Those people "shared the love" by giving it to others, making their own intranet, connected to the internet.

Secondly the protesters made use of their cell phones as video cameras in order to impart the horrific things that was occurring in their country. In contrast to the videos and images pouring out of Libya however, there are rather benign. Never the less, images of Mubarks security forces running over protests by the dozen are quite shocking, and no doubt fueled support for their protest outside of the country, and inside of Egypt, too.

Lastly the Revolution used social networking sites such as Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube in order to spread their words. Facebook was used in order to organize the protests (Although in later days it was no longer needed to organize anything, for they occurred everywhere at all times). Youtube was used in order to host the videos, while sites like reddit were used to spread word of the atrocities far faster the conventional news sources so much as knew of them.

Here is a graphic displaying more tools the Egyptians used in order to protest. Seeing as I do not know Arabic, I will attempt to expand on their usefulness.

Hoodie, goggles, and Gloves: they serves a double purpose, for protection. They prevent damage from light projectiles, pepper spray, and broken glass, all things likely to be found in major protests and riots. They also serve to mask the identity of the protester, so that one can protest with impunity.
Shoes: Protect against broken glass and whatnot. Doesn't mask your identity, though.
Pot Lid: I makeshift shield, for when police shoot mild projectiles (Sandbags, paint-balls, pepper-balls), or beat them.
Spraycan: To spread the word, or to bank out the president's face on posters.
Singular Rose: To deliver to the funeral of the man you murdered, in order to creative a name and symbol of yourself. Staple of detective novels.
Trashbag(?): Te clean up the city and dump it on police's head, I'd assume.

Content is King

We are all present on the internet, yet so few of us give back to this system by which we derive so much joy and facts. Also funny cat pictures and pictures of scantily clad young females. If I were to create a blog, it would surely be about my favorite subject: engineering. Perhaps funny cat pictures, but most likely engineering.

Carl in his early days

I know that the head of First has created a blog, along with many other engineers. For example, Notch (Creator of Minecraft and computer engineer) has a blog set up. I love engineering in all its forums, thus to create a blog about anything other then engineering is almost silly to me.

Machine Control

Picture:

What my group had to do to complete this project was to create a device that could move back and forth in a specific area and be able to transport materials along with it. The device must be controlled by a potentiometer.

We did this because we were put into a hypothetical situation of having to transport waste to and from a work site.

The who:

David: Was the one who designed all of our coding for our actual machine
Tom: Helped design and put together the hardware that David coded

Rafe and Henry did all of our drawings and took screenshots of the code.

Dylan took all of our pictures and also helped with putting together the hardware.

"Programming"

I believe we all made an equal contribution though it was obvious David had the toughtest job.

Input/output lab thinggy

We ran a brief barrage of tests on a set of input/outputs from fisherprice products. Firstly, the switch.








It is a standard switch with two outputs, a NO  and a NC.
three is nornally unchecked and results in a zero when in the testing, with no voltage output.
When using two, it is normally checked and gives a one in the testing window, outputting voltage. thus switching between outputs 2 and three switches the results.



Next came the pot, which has the great values of between 43 and 5000, whilst the NTC resistor records 5000 initially, and 1183 after it gets some heat.





Next came the outputs, where changing the output voltage changes the speed or volume of the product. You can change to CCW from CW on the motor by changing the polarity.






The reed switch is triggered by magnets, thus the addition of an electromagnet will trigger it, switching it from 0 to 1, thus the reed switch is considered normally closed.






The photoresistor and transistor are sonsors that are light sensitive. the photoresistor is closed when there is light, and open when there is darkness. The phototransistor has more resistance when there is more light. You can easily switch the actiopn of this (normal closed vs. noramally open) via programming.

The miniswitch's wiring diagram is simple, line witha circle indicates it moves, and lines indicate lines of power. Thus it is noramlly closed where the line makes a complete circuit, and it is normally open when there is a break in the line.

Team Building Exercise

We had to pass a tennis ball between a group of people as fast as possible. The ball had to touch each person's hands the first round, and the second round it had to physically be in possession on the person before it could be passed around.


Thusly the first round we went with this design:
The arm "a" indicates a singular person who retainer possession of the ball the entire time. She would quickly roll the ball over everyone's hand (represented with "O"), which achieved a fast time. However, the rules were quickly changed to say the ball must  be in each persons possession in order to win. Thus revisions were necessary.


The second round we changed the design drastically:

Here we line the hands to make a large ramp, where we drop the ball from the top. The ball thusly touches each person's hand, and they are in possession of the ball for a millisecond. However, questions were raised as to whether we all touched the ball, as the ball would frequently "hop" a hand. Thus another redesign was in order.





Lastly, we modified the design:

Now everyone had two hands in the came, and the ball would fall and brush by each person's hand. This not only allowed us to constantly have the ball touch each person's hand, but also for the ball to achieve greater speeds. This design worked very well, if it weren't for the other team winning. Their design was very similar, but the ball only touched each of their fingers, not was stopped for a second by their hands before it was released.




Next time we would approach an activity of similar nature, I would retain the way the ideas were made, for we had an "open forum" style, which was very productive and resulted in good designs. I would also ensure the rule set was firm, to avoid these mid-game changes.

Ship at sea

We were asked to evaluate a list of objects and rank them by their usefulness when deserted on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

Personal Order:

1. A floating seat cousin: In case the boat sinks (I figured if you drown nothing else will be of any assistance to you. Also sitting in a raft all day would eventually hurt your behind.)
2. A shaving mirror: to attract people, to save me (If I can't get help then no amount of food nor water will ultimately save me)
3. plastic sheeting
4. Gas
5. Water
6. Fishing kit
7. Army rations
8. Rum
9. Mosquito netting
10. Rope: to use with the net
11. Sextant, Maps, and radio: All useless without other technology, such as a paddle.

The group that I was with had identical choices, excluding the inclusion of the seat cousin so high up on the list. I figured that drowning is a real hazard, they figured it was a non-issue. Also they tended to move the opaque plastic sheeting as a sun shield, which I found humorous.

Our choices were very similar to those of the experts, although they did rank the seat cushion much lower, which was surprising. Also ranked the oil lower, however heat is one of the most important things to sustain. Personally I'd go with experimental data, that is actually getting trapped on a raft, for experts are frequently incorrect, just less so then a normal person.