Well, this week has been lovely… what has gone well folks? Anything cool?
My win - I figured out how to build a parametric model in onshape that I can configure using an outside web application. Actually, really simple. Which is neat. I’ve also been playing with designing in supports for parts because auto generated supports bother me.
One of my good friends from the US is in town for a while, so that’s pretty exciting.
We’ve had some pretty nice sunsets lately.
Normal weekly shenanigans have continued. And I got a lot of work done this week, and we decided my Turkish is good enough that I can start, with a little help, dealing with some of the stuff where we have to directly contact teams to ask them about stuff.
Also, today has been cool, but that will likely come in next week’s update 
I reffed at the off-season event in Midland last weekend.
Wednesday my wife and I made our annual pilgrimage to Frankenmuth. We bought a few new Christmas ornaments and filled up on fried chicken and all the sides.
I made a new friend! Her name is Steppers (I can’t for the life of me remember what her actual name is, just that she gets really excited about stepper motors). You know it’s probably true friendship when you are both ragging on another grad student for suggesting an Arduino mega isn’t good enough when really their problem is they used Serial protocol instead of Standard Firmata. I think we are going to have some good talks together.
It’s finally raining again here, which is great, because we need the water.
I built a table saw! I’m super proud of it (but am taking lots of precautions, Kiddos, don’t try this at home).
We are in the very preliminary stages of the start of my thesis, but it is finally underway, woop woop!
A family member of mine recently lost a job because they stood up for what their values in a toxic work environment. I’ve been able to both support them emotionally while also reaching out to others when I need to relieve some of the stress that has build up from helping them. While the situation is certainly a major lose, I believe way we are handling it is a win.
We had a great time at Cow Town Throw Down in KC!
Saw some great robots we hadn’t seen before. After graduating a big class, we’ve got lots of new members this year, so it was awesome to give them experience in their first competition.
Cowtown was awesome. Lots of great bots, half the field this year went to champs.
One of our FTC teams finally has an autonomous working. Good considering our first event is next weekend.
Our swerve prototype is finally driving, and we’re working on making autonomous work (it’s currently buggy).
Made our pilgrimage to Martinsville Speedway. Got to witness the first and only time that a real car would ride the wall to go faster around the turn (like in a video game which, of course, is where the driver got the idea from). Pretty sure NASCAR will be making a rule against it.
For those curious what it looked like, YouTube “Martinsville Rimshot”.
Another revolution around the sun and job offer signed to return to where I interned last summer. Robot-wise, watching Beach Blitz, which seems to be going swimmingly.
After 3 months of injury and 2 months of physical therapy, today I’ve finally recovered enough to do my first leg workout since getting injured.
The lesson I’ve learned from this: be careful when you kick.
Hope it’s OK I add a 2nd one. A couple other mentors, I, and about a half dozen of our students volunteered at our local FTC meet today. It was a lot of fun – there’s a very different “vibe” than FRC, plus they even let me be a Robot Inspector.
I continued work on my CNC router cleanup/improvement project, which included diagnosing and removing a clog in the water-cooling loop, cutting down a new sacrificial sheet, and starting the process of organizing our super messy tooling collection. Lots of work to do, but lots of progress has been made, so I’m feeling good. 
Swerve finally finished(its a programming issue now 
), and now I kinda don’t know what to do with myself. Probably should do some organizing, and teach some new people how to use the shop more.
On a personal win, school is going great, and recently I’ve been getting into xrc and now want to put every single robot in it to play
Was a driver at tidal tumble last weekend with one of my friends and had a blast, both of our driver teams did really well, my friend and I made it to round 4 with 2102 and 4501.
I also got my varsity jacket with our teams number font 
Bit of a ranking rollercoaster for us at Beach Blitz today. Fried shooter motor and vision issues took us down to 24th, but some good saves by later alliance partners helped us move back up.
In other news, we’ve worked out/around most the kinks in the scouting app I developed this past week.
Also it seems like PhotonVision’s AprilTags betas are catching on. I saw another team at BB doing pose estimation demos.
Remind me to say hello in person tomorrow. Check in the zebra herd.
Heck yes. That stuff is CRAZY good.
(Tangent, not exactly a win)
In retrotape’s final chance to betray us, the BB venue has a laser-grid smoke detector system on the ceiling, putting these lovely installations:
right above the heads of the back row of bleachers. To the poor ref that several robots have nailed with 5-balls, I hope you’re getting hazard compensation.
I ain’t going to say no to more wins…
In fact, I’ll share a second one myself - Raspberry Pis are basically unobtanium but I did learn that you can buy android phones fairly cheaply… so I’m trying to connect a board with a bunch of PWM outputs, some LEDs, and analog inputs to an android application. Actually better than a Pi - it has wifi, a camera, bluetooth, and a touchscreen.
Downside - I haven’t done android development in 10 years and I’ve never written Kotlin. But after several hours of dealing with that (which a not insignificant portion were me forgetting that I needed to send a carriage return…)
And today I’ve successfully walked a mile, pain-free!
