pretty pretty princess

the patriots won this afternoon. unfortunately, i missed the entire game because i was at practice (scrimmage against brandeis!). i crossed through the z-center when there was 3:30 left in the 4th quarter, tried to speed walk/run to simmons to maybe catch the end of it....but alas, FAILED. i think emily took a nap during the game, so cindy was the only one who saw any of it.

in between playoff games, we played another round of pretty pretty princess. petek joined us this time, but unfortunately, we couldn't get ben to play.

petek, the newest pretty pretty princess

ben can't stand the sight of the ridiculousness, nor would he participate :(

in order to deposit balls and score, we needed a ramp to push the balls out of the robot. i built the ramp that knight suggested, which worked well, except the kit didn't include enough flat gears. when we first got the lego kit, i thought there were way too many pieces in it than we needed. now i don't think there are enough.

we borrowed a few of team 07's balls to test out the ramp. they got a little creative with their game balls...

emily created some sparks with our happyboard as the poor soldering of the battery wires to the happyboard by the TAs came off the board. unfortunately, the board stopped working, and when we tried to boot it up, we got a :( instead of a :) = unhappyboard. perhaps it was also sad that the packers lost to the giants. :(

a day of massive productivity

cindy and i were supposed to head over to simmons at 8am. unfortunately, i have become too good of friends with my snooze button and hit it one too many times, so i rolled out of bed at 8. cindy, on the other hand, didn't wake up to her alarm and woke up when emily called her at 8:20. apparently we don't do well with early morning meetings.

i worked on the gear box all day long -- it took us a while to learn how to attach two motors to one wheel, but we figured it out after watching a few youtube videos and asking david who lives across the hall from emily.

gearbox version 1.0

we decided the first version of the gearbox was a little too big, so i tried to make it smaller. it sounds so easy to do, but it took a ton of thinking and about 2 hours.

gearbox version 2.0

as i worked on the gearbox, cindy and emily worked on making a ball shooter. even though we might not use this on our robot, it sure was cool.

after running some errands in the afternoon (cvs, sprint store, star market) we arrived back at simmons before kelly, jake, and jeremy, who went on a target/costco trip. we had asked kelly to buy us pot pies from costco, which were going to be our dinner, so while we waited for them, we decided to play a round of pretty pretty princess.

the game board

the pink princess

the blue princess

the green princess

we watched an antm cycle 4 marathon while we worked on the robot in the evening (i worked on connecting the two gear boxes together, cindy worked on assignment 4, and emily played with the happyboard and the sensors). we even caught the episode where tyra banks started yelling at one of the girls who was eliminated, which was very very entertaining. i think we got cindy (who had never seen an episode before tonight) hooked on the show. :)

here is the result of our day's work. it's not exactly doing what we wanted it to do...but it was so late that we called it a night and decided to fix it tomorrow.

a day of unproductivity

ad in a store window in harvard square

...for me, at least.

my supervisor decided to leave work at noon, so i decided that it was ok for me to leave at 2. then, i got to spend some quality "me" time in the afternoon, which i haven't gotten to do since the beginning of iap. :)

little did i know that emily and cindy were busy in emily's room coding all afternoon. when i learned about that at prayer, i felt bad about not helping them out (even though i am pretty useless when it comes to coding.)

instead of attending workshop #5 pt. 1, we decided to grab some dinner at sunset grill and then work afterwards. we stood and waited for saferide to come, but after waiting 15 minutes with no sign of boston west, we changed our minds and headed to harvard square to eat at border cafe. (by the way, boston west came when we crossed the street and stood at the #1 bus stop. figures.)

margaritas at border cafe!

after dinner, we decided to call it a night and not do any work. :D i should've gone to bed early, but instead, i stayed up and rearranged the books on my bookshelf based on color. it turned out pretty well, yea? :)

oh.em.gee.

from the bostonist.com: The Cambridge Chronicle hopped right on it and, while they couldn't reach the owner, things aren't looking so good for the burnt caramel: "Toscanini’s Ice Cream, a mainstay for cool treats in Central Square since 1981, may not ever open again, and its owner, Gus Rancatore, owes the state’s Department of Revenue more than $167,000 in back taxes."

tosci's is gone forever?!?! the state of massachusetts should understand what they did -- didn't some of its residents throw a crapload of tea into the ocean to protest taxes back in the day? *sigh.

after work, i went to solder some more of our sensors (specifically, the LEDs and phototransistors). kelly, jeremy, and jake's group was there as well, so kelly came by to hang out while the boys fiddled with their robot. i would ask her a question about how to solder the sensor, and she would go find jake and he would tell me what i needed to do. it was flipping fantastic. :) i think our phototransistors would've looked extremely bad if it wasn't for team 07's help.

we decided to blow off workshop 4 and instead got assignment 3 checked off. the robot didn't work as well as it did in the video, but it was enough for us to get checked off. we also purchased 4 more motors just in case we need them later.

time to start building the real robot. :)

ouch! charlie bit me...

i woke up this morning on my futon, with my pillow under my head, and a blanket covering me. what's interesting is that i definitely went to sleep on my bed, with my pillow under my head, under my covers. apparently i can now sleepwalk with my pillow.

assignment 3 is due tomorrow, so cindy and emily met this morning to begin some of the construction of our pseudo-robot. when i met up with them for lunch at cosi they had built the gear box and the motor mounts, which looked very good. i would've much rather done that than finish up two western blots at work. (by the way, 1 out of 2 worked! 50% success rate...heck yea!)

cindy went back to lab for a few hours and soldered some more of our sensors, and then tag-teamed emily and me before she ran off to watch the celtics beat the trailblazers. emily and i fiddled with the gear boxes some more in the course 6 lab, and petek came to visit! petek, by the way, gives amazing lower back massages. :) then emily and i camped out on the floor of my room to finish construction of the robot. note to self: remember how to brace the motor mounts to beams, or forget the motor mounts and stick tape on the motors.

motor mounts/bracing

emily programming, and the lovely state of my floor

after a full day of work, we got our robot built, our legos braced, and our code running. throw in monday's episode of american gladiators, an entire plate of dropped noodles, and cheese dip and crackers, and i'd call it a successful day. :D

p.s. did you know that british babies speak in british accents? :P

soldering and such

i overslept. again. *sigh.

i walked into work at around 9:40 (an hourish after i usually do), and learned that our weekly group meeting had been moved to 10am. since i was late getting to work, and my experiments were going to take all day, i decided to skip the meeting. here's the exchange that i had with my supervisor when he came into the cell culture room after the meeting:

me: how was the meeting?
sean: *looks around* you can't tell anyone this yet...
me (thinking. GAH. the one meeting i go to and i miss all the exciting stuff...)
sean: aileen quit.

(aileen = the head of our group)

it was a jaw-dropping, shell-shocking moment. for me at least. but i am just the summer/iap intern so i'm not really in the loop.

anyway, me getting into work = me leaving late. i apologize to cindy and emily who were busy tooling away in the course 6 labs. or trying to get our evil happyboard to work.

we attended workshop 3 tonight, which was infinitely more entertaining because team 07 (jeremy, jake, kelly) was there as well. tonight's project: attach wires and headers to our sensors, and get them to work on our happyboard. life would've been much easier if only our happyboard was not evil, and did not print random letters and sad faces all the time. cindy managed the soldering iron, emily tried fixing the happyboard, and i got to play with legos.
:) we make an excellent team, if i say so myself. whether we actually make a functioning robot is a completely different story.

the one sensor that took us forever to make was the breakbeam sensor, and that was probably because i soldered it. i also managed to melt some of the plastic on the sensor because i wasn't paying attention to where i put the iron, and burn my left index finger. then cindy took over, and everything went a lot faster. i think we ended up working on the sensor for 45 minutes...

cindy's amazing soldering drive caused her to solder the wires on the motors together

we left lab at 11. i have a sinking feeling that this is going to become a habit.

we are so in over our heads

1/14: first snowfall of 2008

assignment 2 was due tonight (assignment 2 = strategy and timeline for our robot) so we met in the student center before going to workshop 2 to finish it up. cindy decided to rename the arm of sabotage (an arm that reaches into our opponents 4 point bin and scoops out their balls) to the raccoon arm of sabotage, a change that was rejected by emily. she doesn't dig the bandits.

we trekked down to lab for workshop 2, which was about building with legos. unfortunately, knight, the organizer leading the workshop, had seen a bunch of people's robots and was happy with them, which meant that he shortened his talk. emily, cindy, and i looked around the room and saw a bunch of groups with the bulk of their robots built -- and i think we each felt a sinking feeling in our stomachs. we were supposed to build a robot already??? where on the course website does it say that?!?

the three of us sat down for the next hour and a half and created a 10FLUx10FLU cube that could be dropped from 6 feet and not break. it was one of the exercises on the workshop 2 handout, but i think we were the only group who did this. after multiple unsuccessful drops, we finally got one to work. the corners of these legos are now a little bent -- some could call them battle wounds. :)

we turned in our assignment to knight, who proceeded to ask us questions about our strategy and what motors/sensors we were planning on using. now, i don't know what the other groups strategies were, or how course 6 students think about these things, but at one point, knight read the section on our arm of sabotage and stood and laughed for a good 30 seconds. we kind of looked uncomfortably at each other as this happened. he drilled us about our strategy, shot down a few of our ideas, and we walked away thinking "we are so in over our heads."

i think we will be happy if we create a robot that just moves and deposits balls. or if we can successfully complete assignment 3.