Hey sorry a bit late today, with the holiday I totally forgot yesterday was Friday so you get it a day late.
What wins do you have this week? I know for a lot of the US Thursday was a holiday so hopefully everyone saw family if they wanted to.
My big win is it’s a nice 4 day weekend for me. I’ve been running on fumes for a few weeks after an EU effort I was supporting and just never had the time to catch up.
Celebrated Thanksgiving with all my surviving siblings and kids.
Then went to the tree farm on Friday and now there’s a wonderful smelling concolor fir in our living room.
I still need to get a KVM Switch to be able to hook it properly into my primary Battlestation setup, but I built my new PC:
Ryzen 9 5950X CPU
Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black CPU Cooler
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti XC3 Ultra GPU
Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 RAM
WD Black SN850 1TB SSD
WD Black SN850 2TB SSD
WD Black SN750 2TB SSD
MSI MPG X570S Edge MAX WiFi Motherboard
Seasonic FOCUS Plus 850 80+ Gold PSU
Fractal Design Pop Air Magenta Mid-Tower Case
The group working on a prototype ball transport mechanism was getting stuck on the best way to work around the existing structures in their prototyping chassis. I had the three team members each sketch out different scenarios, belt on the bottom, belt on one side and belt on top. After discussing the possible pros and cons of each approach, they settled on the belt on one side since it could carry the ball to under the shooter (unlike the belt on top) and the parts like the motor and gearbox did not interfere with existing mechanisms. In the past, they had been using more of a “build now, design later” methodology.
I got the smoker out for Turkey Day and did some thighs and drumsticks. I also smoked some Cheez Its and Triscuits for snacks since some friends have become addicted to them.
A winning week…
-short work week
-new phone
-time with parents
Oh, and I got my tree up (but not fully decorated yet).
Robot concept I made based off of another thing kind of worked.
I got out team’s Limelight to run Photonvision and detect AprilTags.
How did your cheez-its turn out? I can never get mine right. Everything looks tasty!
It gives them a smoky flavour. They were the “original” type. I have tried the low-fat type, store brand imitations and Goldfish crackers and none of them worked as well. You probably already know not to put water in the pan. The moisture makes them soggy. I run the smoker at 225F which crisps them up nicely. I am also using an external smoke generator from Master built. The heating element in it is constantly on so it is constantly generating smoke. The heating from the sun and the high ambient temperature in the summer makes the heating element in the smoker run for so little time that none of the wood chips were getting burned. The external smoke generator is connected to the smoker with a 6 or 8ft piece of aluminum flexible duct that happens to match the inlet port of the smoker and outlet port of the smoke generator. The duct is supposed to cool the smoke and cause some of the stuff like creosote to condense out of the smoke.
Went on a trip to New Orleans.
We somewhat assembled a swerve module
Prepared for hosting a FLL Challenge Practice event, figuring out the food options and such.
Edit: also just got word that our nfc attendance system is working
I mean, I guess Stance Stance Revolution worked in a sense…
Except mine doesn’t have traditional drive, it uses the weapons to get around, similar to Droopy.
Like @philso, I fired up my smoker (charcoal, barrel with side mount fire box) for the first time since it fell off the trailer on US-190 a few months ago and I dragged it off the highway. A few taps of the hammer got it back to functionality if not total symmetry. The results were great! A roughly 18# turkey, a roughly 12# pork shoulder, a roughly 1.5# salmon fillet, and a dozen oysters, all quite smoky and cooked but still juicy. I also made stocks with the turkey and pork bones for future meals.
While it was actually last week, I was tasked to prepare and present briefs to customers at an annual meeting for the first time in about ten years, on rather short notice (two days, or about 6 hours prep time after doing my day jobs as my branch’s tech lead and production manager and, for those days, acting supervisor). Based on the level of engagement, I knocked it out of the park. I suspect that I’ll have to turn over a few bits of follow up over when I retire (~2 years if the market bounces back and there isn’t anything I’m not ready to turn over).
I got the logo for my new hot sauce, which might just barely be on sale before Christmas!
Where can I buy?
It’ll be on my webstore once it’s available (probably going to be a few weeks to a month). www.FrogsPointHoney.com
It finally started acting like November around here - we badly need rain, so it’s nice to see a little rain.
This week I’m heading back to Seattle for a couple weeks to participate in a gingerbread house contest my sister set up, and one of my best friends’ wedding 
Also I’ll do a day of FLL judging while I’m back I’m excited for that. FLL judging is a lot of fun. I used to judge at the State Tournament in Illinois, I did it once at the Izmir Open International, now I get to do it once back in my home town at the high school I graduated from
This took way, way longer than it should have…
Orders will go out after Buckeye.
Your shipping is kinda brutal, but tossed an order in for that and some of the honey I’ve been watching for a while 
