Toothpicks Everywhere

 So, lots of shenanigans this semester... which is awesome. My roommate and I balanced this sled on the bathroom door while Sam was in taking a shower. We placed a cup of toothpicks on top of it so when he came out everything would fall down, scaring him and throwing toothpicks everywhere. 

Mission Accomplished. 

The next morning the toothpick cup was balanced on top of the door and they went everywhere again when I opened it the door..... so we did the same thing to Chris too.

Anyways, I've been blasting this inverter research stuff that I'm doing which is sweet. So far it has been, make a bunch of PCBs and rock out. I really like designing PCBs and I am getting very proficient with Alitum designer which is pretty rock solid design software. Here is the first board I laid out. I fabricated it on the PCB milling machine in our engineering hall, unfortunately it is having issues picking up the tool bits from the tool holder which causes more grief than it should because the software is so terrible. At one point during the milling process, the machine went to pickup a tool and essentially slammed down on the tool holder so hard that it wrecked the holder and failed to pickup the tool. I would not recommend buying of these. Luckily after some screwing around we were able to complete the process enough so that both sides were milled and all the holes were drilled. I actually had to cut out the board with a bandsaw because the power went out over night and I lost the process I was on. 

After a long struggle with the machine, the parts came in a couple days later and I threw it all together. The best part of the whole thing is that it worked first time. Yes. That is correct. Everything worked exactly how I intended, the first time. Maybe this four year degree thing is turning out to be useful after all? Anyways, the board looks complicate but it's just 8 triacs that are used to switch on and off AC loads. Put a 15V signal in and get two adjacent spade terminals to short essentially. This will be one building block for our inverter research. Next to come will be the current and voltage sensor boards, then the actual inverter. Because the PCB mill is shitting its self so hard, we are going to send our design for the sensor board to a board shop. The inverter is special and requires high current traces that we can't produce in house so that will also be sent out. 

.... And it even works!

In other electronics related news, I'll be buying one of these fancy rigs. It is an Arm Processor (like what all kinds of cellphones run) and is pretty badass especially for that price. Hoping to make our senior project way... wayyyyyyyy wayyyy better. We'll see how that goes. 

In other news, I tried playing hockey for the first time today. I am very sore now. I haven't been on skates in like 10 years. It was fun, but everyone I played with was pretty damn good so it was kind of hard to be much help. I found that I could setup screens and block stuff sometimes though which was good enough. I also had a couple pretty good falls. Hopefully I can get some more practice skating and give it another shot soon though. Owwww....