This Week in Nuzzo History

Boom. Finished my finals, got an A- in senior project (FUCK YEAH). Just rolled into Litchfield and currently awaiting the arrival of my sister.... who was accepted to the accelerated nursing program at NYU yesterday! Hooray! I'm very proud and happy for her, she will be getting done work and moving to New York very soon because the program starts next month.... talk about a life changing event. Additionally today was Papa Nuzzos very last day of work ever, for real this time, no take backs. After working in Nuclear power for 40+ years I expect dad will further his skill set by welding more, fixing everything around the house, driving mom crazy and clogging the computer with spyware (Cheney has a running bet on how long the computer will last with my dad out of work). Hooray Papa Nuzzo!

Anyways, so that's sweet. Here is a picture of our completed and passing (notice how I don't say working) senior project. The project works to meet our specs but has some serious issues when spinning the motor.... it actually stalls the motor after roughly one minute depending on the speed of the motor. We kind of ran out of ideas of why this happens and definitely ran out of time to fix it, so we just had to free ball it and run it for our hardware show. It made for some unique discussions during the hardware show.

Complete with precision speed indicator and ninja surface mount soldering splendor!  

 We may be overhauling the design again with some significant changes by the end of the year because as it is right now, I am NOT standing in front of a crowd to present this thing.... that shit is too sketchy.

Also, they put up a wind turbine on campus recently mostly to collect data for a 1/8th scale floating platform test that will happen off the coast of Maine in a few months. The Advanced structures and composites center (the people behind all this deep offshore wind stuff, formally the AWEC) also just won a big grant funding their project. The other day they took it down to run a few more sensors up the tower I think, so naturally I went over to bump fists with other windymill folks. Met a grad student who worked there and knew about Pika energy, which was sweet. His name was Curtis (good name) and he told me to come by and he'd give me a tour sometime. Nice.

Windmills always look like a fish out of water when they're tilted down. 

For now, I'm making a turkey and going to kick back with the family tonight. Hoping to read a book over break, do christmas things and start assembling the engine for the bus. God it feels nice to not be at school and damn it feels good to be a gangster.

Legos, Christmas Trees, Dirty knees.... PCBs?!?!

Week before finals here and I should be studying and stuff but yeah....

Last week we used the newly purchased PCB machine (sketchily made in eastern Europe) in the basement of Barrows Hall (where all the sketchy EET majors live). The machine is a PCB mill that actually takes a copper clad board and these little tiny milling heads and literally mills every trace out of the board to make a PCB. I was very leery about using this machine for multiple reasons, largely because there is no solder mask which essentially mean all the traces are uninsulated. So if you put a screwdriver or anything metal on the top or bottom of the board it will likely ruin your day. Also, these types of boards tend to lend themselves to being very fragile... traces tend to lift up, pads fall off, etc. Lastly, being a new machine the most knowledgable people about the machine's operation happen to be another senior project group that has made like 5 PCBs in an effort to create one working one. Lucky for us, they offered to give us a hand and our board came out of the machine the right way the first time.

Unfortunately for us, we've had a lot of issues populating the board despite the fact that I got all but one non-essential component footprint correct. Weird connection issues with the through hole components, and a lack of solder mask doesn't help. We've ripped up a couple of traces accidentally, and generally made a mess of the board. Today we finally got the entire board populated and apparently working until we blew yet another gate driver and threw in the towel for the day. Here is a picture of the unpopulated PCB.....

Top Layer of the PCB

I'll throw up a picture of the populated board once it's working. We've got to screw it all down and stuff for this coming Tuesday when we have our hardware show where the profs come in, abuse our project and grill us on all kinds of stuff about it. Bring it on bitches! 

Last weekend I went down to the First Lego League competition at the Augusta Civic center with a couple of other robotics club folks. I was a referee for the game and we brought our t-shirt launcher and shot some shirts to the crowd. We also actually nailed a t-shirt throw a crack in the ceiling of the civic center that on our first shot. It will likely stay there forever. It made me laugh pretty damn hard after I pushed the button to fire it. Whoops! Oh and the Owl's Head Transportation Museum was there!

The Benz

Last Sunday my roommate Nick and I went out Christmas tree hunting while Sam and Ariel stayed home and engineered a stand for it. We ended up finding a pretty good candidate and brought it home on top of the Subaru. Nick decorated it and it looks pretty decent. Best part is how home-like it makes our living room feel. Everyone wanted to hang out there after we put up the tree.

Festive as shit!

Today we presented our awesome project for ECE478, a PID motor controller! It controls the position of a DC motor (lego) with variable Kp, Ki and Kd terms. It works pretty awesomely except the derivative term is messed up a bit and we didn't really mess with it enough to sort it out. Essentially there is too much noise in the system and the microcontroller is taking a derivative of some BS, resulting in a jittery motor. Anyways, it's sweet and I think I might get to keep it cause I paid for most of the parts. Maybe I can get a sweet video of it in action for you guys. It's no SEGFAULT by any means and it isn't analog either.

Lego and PID control nice!

Wow. I am realizing that my inability to communicate with normal people again. I just speak jargon, that's all I do now..... ohhh bother.

Tyler Saturday! YAY!!!!

Starting to brainstorm Christmas presents too. I shipped my reddit secret santa gift today too! I bought this guy a ticket to the New Years celebration at the Joshua Tree in Somerville, MA. Hopefully he liked it, I should be receiving mine soon too. Definitely buying dad an auto dimming welding helmet.... Ok, I really want to use it alright!?! Is that so wrong?

Finals Week Bitches

Don't have much time to make any kind of lengthy post. I have often lamented the dreaded Loucks test on here and tomorrow I have two Loucks finals, in a row. I'm not really sure how to prepare for what will undoubtedly be 10 hours or more of testing other than resigning myself rather fatalistically to whatever will be. So it goes.

With all the stress this week, Boffer has been a blessing. Saturday we did a successful joint game with Nerf Squad. Then this week we are meeting every single night of finals for two hours. Won't make it tomorrow but I did go tonight. Something odd happened this month, I became good at Boffer. Like properly good. At the joint Nerf game on Saturday we were playing capture the flag and the flagbearer pointed at the other team and said, "Kill them already!" and I said "Okay" and proceeded to kill 5 people as nonchalantly as possible, winning the game for us. The next round I jumped over a shield wall with the flag to win. Today I killed the entire opposing team in a team deathmatch, nine people mind you, in under six seconds, by myself. I didn't even get behind their line, I picked off the guy on the flank and moved down their god damned line single file. That last one single handedly made whatever horror show that might happen tomorrow okay.

Looking forward to break. Just keep reminding myself that I'm going to go home, forget what a Poisson Bracket is and bring a Jeep pick up back from the dead. Also going to Orono on Saturday. Should be a rootin' tootin' good time.

James May's Toy Stories

Seriously, this show is everything I've ever wanted.

James May's Toy Stories - Scalextric

James May's Toy Stories - Spitfire