a = g*sinθ God God Damn it Damn it

Howdy ho gents. I'm basking in the last few minutes of freedom before the week begins and figured I'd post something in the general direction of you glorious bitches.

Last week was long. As predicted it consisted of studying for and taking my Advanced Mechanics exam on Thursday. We do these tests on Thursday since most people in the Liberal Arts college have Thursday off so we can take it when we feel like it and take as long as we want. Now I don't have mornings off as I have to TA for the Physics I lab, the one without calculus. Almost all the students are pre-med or just trying to get rid of their lab science requirement. The lab was literally just a ramp with a block, you know the angle, find the acceleration. Being someone studying for the advanced classical mechanics exam all night it was really hard not to start screaming a = g*sin θ at the top of my lungs. I did find it funny when one of the students asked if I had taken the Calculus based physics, but the way she said it, there was a lot of emphasis/reverence put on the phrase "calculus-based". I really wanted to respond, "Nay, I have only heard of it in lore" but I told her I did and that I was now taking advanced calculus-based physics which just turns out to be differential equations based physics with some tensor calculus thrown in for good measure.

Then I took the test and in good Loucks test fashion, it took me six god damned hours. Interesting fact: not the longest Loucks test I've ever taken. The past two weeks though had been building up to that test so it felt really good to be there. Because it was the end of my hell weeks for a little bit. I had that night afterwards planned out. I had a few Sam Adams in the fridge and recently had received Forza 4 in the mail as I had left it at home like an idiot. So got out, catched up on the Daily Show for a week and stayed up racing my Fiesta around Mt. Fuji. It was almost disappointing when I woke up and realized it was Friday and still had to sit through classes.

Then we went to the Spears Auction in Andover. It's this biweekly estate auction that takes place in a warehouse in the middle of the woods and is filled with lots Amish people and elderly people with camouflage clothing. You walk in and get your number, there is soda, coffee and little debbies snacks with a little bowl to put a dollar in if you get anything. Then they auction off a fuck load of stuff, complete with the auctioneer guy talking fast and making lots of cracks about Obama care when selling file cabinets. "Thirty dollars. 25 dollars. Come on people think Christmas. Opening bid at 20 dollars. Think of the 9000 pages of Obamacare you can store in that thing. 10 dollars." Its an insanely good time. I got a new charcoal grill and a big Coca-Cola pitcher. My roommates got a wireless pc game controller, some picture frame and a heated foot massager. The picture frame is for our room portrait. We're going to take a picture of the four of us and then I'm going to photoshop the hell out of it and make a paint by numbers and then paint it. Exciting stuff.

Then this weekend we had our first forest battle for Boffer. Our club has gotten so much bigger and better with this new crop of Freshmen type recruits. We had a problem last year with people who saw us as a light version of the campus Medieval Club. Most of our members were Medieval Club people who wanted to sword fight twice as much in a week. The problem was that they hit really fucking hard in Medieval Club. They have fight practice where they put on a fuck load of leather and actually bash each other in with baseball bats. This is not how Boffer Club works. Second they wear tunics and have roleplaying alter egos and all this stuff and that culture was being applied to us to the point we were having trouble distinguishing ourselves. Well these freshmen don't have such preconceptions, we had two separate booths at the Club Fair after all and our booth had no armor and handed them a free sword on principle.

So the forest battle was Grade A bad ass. We were in the woods for maybe four hours with over twenty people and they are all A+ people. I think I'm going to enjoy running this club this year. Until next time guys.

Gaze upon my creation and be in awe.
GAZE UPON IT!

A Rainy Day Post

Hello gents!

It has been raining like mad here today and most of the weekend which is kind of a bummer. We took the t-shirt launcher to our first football game on saturday but due to the crappy weather the crowd was quite thin. Here's a sweet picture of the Black Bear mascot Bananas with the launcher.

Complete with electronics rain condom

It has been a decent weekend, hung out with Dave a bit and built a motor test stand for our senior project. I'll hopefully get to see if I got the dimensions remotely right tomorrow. Got to drive this enormous diesel truck this weekend which was kind of cool. The truck pulled really hard when you step on the gas, nothing really revs up it just goes. I wouldn't want a truck that large but basically diesel powered things are sweet.

I've been learning to use this awesome PCB CAD software that costs like $6000 a seat at school. It's called Altium and it can do all kinds of neat stuff. It even has 3d models of the components which is just plain cool. On top of that you can connect different parts with a supplier webpage and it will even tell you if that part is in stock when you place it in a circuit. Pretty sweet. Hopefully we'll make a PCB design with it for our motor controller. We'll have another order of parts for our senior project coming in right off so that should be sweet.

Planning on crankin out some serious progress this week before taking off to visit my sister in DC on friday. Also talking myself out of buying this HUGE MOTOR! So many electric vehicle things....

Exhausted from the Homework or the Lectures or Some Shit Like That

I am way to exhausted for it to be Monday. I've gone through four classes and already demand another weekend.

Well instead of that shit I've just been watching these sketches about RAF Pilots from this show called Armstrong and Miller. Basically it's like these two pilots with the flying the planes and shit like that, who are always smoking their pipes yeah and talking in modern slang and this that and everything else. It's right humorous blood.







Isn't it.

Talking To You Guys is Better Than Homework

Just woke up from the brilliant idea of a pre-homework nap that Elliot suggested. Now I'm still tired and have less time to do a lot of work. I have yet to look at how much it all really is and am afraid to, so instead I will tell you gents about life and such like.

Holy crap, I haven't posted since Black Forest Star Party. Funny since I've had this post open as a draft that entire time. Well good place to start.

BLACK FOREST STAR PARTY WAS AMAZING.

Pictured: Amazing

That gets its own paragraph. Now it time to qualify that statement. Star parties are like any type of standard camping trip. You set up your tent and your camp chairs and chill with people. The big difference is that when the sun sets you do not build a fire to stay warm. The only thing you got that will do that is your jacket and enthusiasm and wouldn't you know I left my jacket in Maine. This is because any light whatsoever, any white light, will draw the fury of thousands of astronomers whose night vision/photo you just ruined. Just ask this numbskull when he opened the door to his Jeep and the lights came on, so much pissed off in my direction.

They don't like having to look away from this so I can
find my Doritos....

Because of this though, I got more dark adjusted than I have ever in my entire life. I was walking around by star light alone. The fun thing is meeting all these cool people, but you have no idea what they look like until you see them the next day. Some stranger walked into our camp during breakfast and I was about to say what the hell until he talked and I suddenly realized "Steve!". Steve was a great guy, had a very nice 20" Dobsonian, got the best view of the Orion Nebula I have every seen through it.

Pictured: Steve

Stayed up all night, two nights in a row. Was able to see the Lagoon Nebula, The Great Cluster in Hercules, the Trifid Nebula, The Double Cluster, the Orion Nebula and Andromeda all with the unaided naked eye on top of everything I saw through so many brilliant telescopes. Just before sunrise I even got to see my shadow cast by Venus. Venus was bright enough to cast shadows on its own. Like holy shit.

Venus shadow, bitches.

I am addicted to these things now and this really helped boost my confidence in going into astronomy. You sit around just learning the facts and figures of it all and you forget why it was so damned interesting in the first place. Also actively hunting the skies with people who have been passionately doing this for years with no pay probably taught me more practical astronomy than I have gained from 4 years of getting my degree in it, in a single weekend to boot.

I will be back, oh yes.

The rest of the week is sort of a blur of Quantum exam, Quantum exam and my test in Quantum Mechanics. It required my full attention for the entire week. Then the weekend came, we watched Dr. Who at the Observatory, as is of course tradition. It was my roommate Josh's 21st and since he isn't really into bar culture we just had some beers while watching Louie. Then today I spent the entire damn day smoking a pork shoulder to make the tastiest damned pulled pork you ever had.

Ian, you better be rooting for me to get accepted to UW.
This could be every damn night.

This week will be a blur of Mechanics exam, Classical exam and my test in Advanced Classical Mechanics.

Sic itur ad astra mother fuckers.

Senior Progress

It's pretty obvious that posts on here have slowed since Tyler and I went back to school, so I figure I should show you a little of what I've been up to. This semester, I get up and drive to campus for class and in between/before/after class I spend time working on my senior project which is a brushless motor controller. Basically I am trying to be like 1/16th as good at this guy. I took a couple of pictures though to show our progress a little, the pictures don't really do justice the time we have put in so far but hey that's how this whole learning thing goes right?

I've been S-T-RUGGLIN' on this PWM thing on the AVR, got some test code working but can't seem to the frequency to be what I want. This will be that piece that drives the gates in our half bridge circuits. Checkout my old school O-scope in my room, awh yeah.

 Dave has a talent and patience for laying out breadboards neatly. Pictured below are our six gate drive ciruits (two for each phase), a sweet MOSFET array (complete with repurposed heat sink), a voltage regulator and our brushless motor direct from Hobbyking (...China).

In that picture we are actually only using the motor as an inductor to see how we handle switching inductive loads. We used a function generator to test some stuff on it but to really test it we need hall effect sensors and an AVR with all sorts of fancy programmin'. 

Left on the list of stuff to do is still basically everything, but high priority items include: learning everything about the AVR atmega8, mounting hall effect sensors, making a motor test stand, learn to use KIcad, use KIcad to make schematics/pcb layout, make a control loop and stuff and make sure we meet out specs. Basically, there is a shit load to do. I am actually enjoying it a lot though and working on it is sort of addicting, I'll be pumped once we start spinning the motor. 

In other news Ian is coming tomorrow. YEAHHHHH BUDDDDYYY!

FURNITURE!

Today I went to IKEA with Allie and bought furniture.  Whoo!  It'll be arriving Wednesday, so I can finally sleep on an actual bed after 3 months of sleeping on an air mattress.  Then I cooked an entire box of pasta for dinner, and it's clear I will be eating pasta approximately forever.  Also had a Slutty Pumpkin.  Turns out I don't like Dirty (ie with an extra shot of expresso) Pumpkin Spiced Iced Lattes, so it was honestly disappointing.  I also started reading Ben Rich's Skunk Works, and now feel totally inferior as an engineer.

Yesterday I hiked Mt. Pilchuck with some other Boeing people.  Fan-freakin'-tastic views.

Corn Mazes and Electric Bikes

Friday, we got to checkout a somewhat homebrew E-bike build by this lady who does public relations for the college of engineering. She isn't an engineer but she read a bunch about e-bikes and kind of pieced this bike frame, hub motor and battery setup together. She had someone build a custom battery box for it and filled it with lithium iron batteries which is sweet. The lady was pretty well informed, I was pretty impressed to hear her talk about it and she even reads endless-sphere.com where all the cool e-bike kids are. The best part was that we got to ride it which was VERY cool. I'm actually a pretty big e-bike fan but I've never gotten to ride one.... hey do you know anyone with an E-bike? Exactly. The acceleration was great, the brakes seemed to be a little under sized though. The controller even has a regenerative brake activated by a button but it doesn't really load the motor much and doesn't slow you down that fast. Overall though, it was awesome and made me want to build awesome electric vehicles even more. 

So this weekend we made a trip to Treworgy Orchards in Levant which is like a half hr ride from Milford. They have an amazing corn maze that is huge and awesome and shaped like a turkey. It was sweet, all of my roommates went and some of their associated women folk. There are these stations you have to find in the maze and they have a name and a location on them, you mark it down on your map and try to figure out this politically correct version of Clue. Anyways, Chris and I started zipping through the maze and in our haste forgot to write down the location and only marked down the names of the people.... we felt pretty stupid but it was awesome. At the end of the maze you get an ice cream too, nice! Oh, we picked apples too. Zach's girlfriend (left) made apple crisp, chicken pot pie and M&M cookies for us. She is excellent. 

Couples Picture

Had a beer with Richard Qualey (yes that guy from 1st year who lived with Toby and left at christmas time) last night which was cool. We had some folks over last night, including one dog. I'll just leave this progression of photos here....