Did anyone do anything cool this week? Pass a test? Wake up on time? Not have a melt down over the fact that it gets dark at like 5 now?
I have two wins this week - it was our orgs annual hack week. I got to work with some of my coworkers to build something really cool. While we didn’t win I think our project is probably one of the closest to reaching production and it helped build a connection to another team. And it was fun.
The second win - I’ve been trying to find a good way to make interactive animations with javascript and made a fair bit of progress there. (Look, I was way too lazy to draw gears and needed something that you could tell was rotating.) And the fact that it’s just plain javascript means linking them to UI elements is easy.
I did manage to keep the cat and myself alive for another week and get sucked into several episodes watching another early 2000s drama. And I connected with a maker friend’s spouse, who donated some of his 3d printing parts and filament.
By some sheer stroke of luck all my grades ended up being over a 90 (Wow!)
cleaned up the shop, started working on a robot cart for pup cups
Some warhammer 40k models i had printed for a friend came out looking great (supports left something to be desired). After he gets them painted I will have my very own dreadnaught. These are pretty cool models, even if they are a pain to print with FDM.
Oh don’t worry, these were all free files off thingiverse and what not. And I’m not selling them anyway. (idrk how the licenses work, but if its free i will be trying to print it)
Thanks for the tip tho. Unfortunately the main issue with these models is the sheer number of details and overhangs make it so there really is no easy way to split the model or minimize supports, i just gotta suffer with the removal process.
At work one of our CAD people took a crack at an outdoor wheel for our Goosebots. This is similar to the TPU wheel designs on CD but for a larger 6 inch wheel with a specific hub for these motors. There’s a plastic wheel in 2 parts that sandwich the TPU tread part. Can’t wait to try it out soon and see how it holds up on concrete!
On the personal side I started a blog/experiment about using AI to make code, images and content from scratch with only minor human editing or guidance allowed. I started October 27th and am really starting to get a good prompt template down.
One part I had to give it lots of help with was making a way to show and copy prompts for any AI generated images without it being annoying or taking away from the appearance of the site. In the future something like this should be kind of how I hope all AI images would be watermarked on webpages. There’s a copy button, what tool it was made with and if I had more room I’d like to put metadata like resolution, date, prompt author, etc. But this is still a great start and if more websites had stuff like that for all images I wouldn’t say no. I just figured that portion out two nights ago so I have to now back fix all of my old blogs but it’s so much better than regular captions
I’m learning so much about prompt engineering this way. Highly recommend trying complex projects for fun and learning experience
Not so much a win for me, but for the others involved.
Our church is supplying food this week for MCREST, a homeless shelter in Mt Clemens, MI. My wife and I helped cook, serve and wash up on Sunday evening. Four women from our church are coordinating it and are there [almost] every day.
Our team meets 6 minutes from here. Would they/you be willing to take some more volunteers? I have no issue with leaving a poster up in our lab/school if there’s a standard system in place for walk in helpers. Any students on the team could help out in their off hours since it’s so close. Not sure if it’s just this week or an ongoing thing
On the Home Reno Front, we were able to narrow the scope of our Asbestos Abasement to 2 of the three bedrooms, the hallway, and laundry/utility room, and have gotten the first layer of sealant down. We’re mostly going this route just because ripping up the tile while following proper safety practices was very time consuming. We also discovered that a lot of the baseboards have various damage at the bottom in many areas, and we don’t feel like replacing those rn, so where the carpet is still at least intact, we’re leaving it for now. We’ll seal the rest eventually, but for now the focus is moving in as quickly as possible while being safe. So still frustrating, but at least making progress!
After we get the second layer of sealant down, next steps are to spackle the pinholes and paint the walls in the Master Bedroom, followed by replacing the receptacles/switches in the master bedroom and the bedroom that will be my home office. Finally we still need to patch the drywall around the vanity and vent in the hallway bathroom, followed by paint and installing the new fixtures.
Here is the color that the bedrooms will be: Valspar’s “Plum Burst” flat/matte finish iirc
Those wheels look great!
FWIW, on concrete unless you are going for grip, smooth wheels or tread like the stock kitbot wheels work better, but i still love what you’ve done!
Concrete as winter approaches, grass in the spring. Eventually… A golf course is the end terrain goal so all terrain (sand, grass and pavement) so the spikes will be useful for the other two if not helpful on pavement. When I say concrete I mean like sidewalk or parking lot, not nessecarily polished concrete. On polished concrete flat or “Racing Slicks” are gonna be better absolutely. The TPU used in our wheel is also really hard so the spikes do not compress very much on concrete but will dig well into dirt
Students have a fire inside them they haven’t had before after being subbed out of the elims at Beach Blitz. They want to “earn” a blue banner, not get carried along. They want to take on more responsibility and leadership, and take ownership.
Yesterday I had the day off in observance of Veterans day, so I decided to get out of my bubble. After getting my first surf session in over three weeks in, drove up to LA and wandered the Getty Center for about 3 hours.
I tried to go to Hollywood and pop into Amoeba Music… but Friday night traffic insanity made parking almost impossible. Got to do some from-the-car sightseeing.
This is such a key experience every student needs. Not that you want them to have a bad experience or lose. What you do want them to do is get knocked down/have a catastrophe and come back with a new energy to never have it happen again. I’m glad they are motivated! This was how our team felt after our first competition this year. Lots of issues but they were all hands on deck even at the event as soon as we were out of contention they were right into planning what to do next.
