(In no small part because I know this horrified @marshall even if he shares my belief that Danny Devito would have been better in this role)
So folks, here is the thread where we celebrate whatever is going well in our lives. Wake up on time this week? Cool. Sleep in because it’s summer break? Also cool. Whatever you’re happy about we want to hear about it.
For my win - I had a really productive week at work. Got into a groove and got a fair bit done.
After months and months of chaos and running at full speed, I finally got to take a break and relax with family on vacation
TFW you get mentioned in a CD thread:
In the middle of two crazy weeks at work: first a visit from potential investors, and next week we’re getting invaded.
And of course, the equipment had to be temperamental with the investors there. I think I counted 4 or 5 separate breakdowns day-of… and we still pulled off a demonstration.
Something always goes wrong on demo day. If everything is going right then something really terrible/unfixable will happen when you least want it to. Let the gremlins work out their jitters early and get it over with.
We tried. You should have seen the numbers we put up through the previous week…
I think the final score, depending on how you count it, for JUST the demo day, was:
1 shifting part that blocked a critical pathway, day of, in process. Fixed quickly but damage was done…
1 shut-down power supply, blocking a slightly different critical pathway–now fixed but had to cool off to fix itself.
1 tripped breaker on a 208V line, cause unknown (at least to me)–that’s the one that ended the demo, for convenience rather than because we didn’t have a backup (we did).
1 bad file, replaced with a better file
1 bad electrical connection/disconnection (I’m not sure which)
1 clogged solenoid on a water line–use filters on your city water, folks, they help. Swapped the solenoid and we were back online.
6 issues, some of which were related and others were fixed…
At least we got the demo done and dusted, and there’s a rumor that the parts we didn’t get to properly show off will be given another chance soonish.
I’m in a similar situation as Eric, we had some quirks during a demo last week but all was okay. I for instance was mid development on a GUI system and someone decided that was a good time to show it to the visitors. Which shame on me for not having my production ready version up on the network when they got in, but the prototype was good enough and already running. They got the gist and will be coming back for a further demo later on the hopefully bug free production verison
The big win for me this week is getting NodeJS to run on my Jetson nano machines and communicate to the roscore running on the Jetson as well. Now I have a great way to make robot guis using my web development experience and not be limited to Ubuntu only machines anymore running Python. Now almost any device can be the GUI and this will save me a lot of time and headaches in development and in provisioning.
For example a joystick! I don’t always have a Bluetooth joystick on me for controlling a robot or if I do my laptop with the right software might be out of the lab. Now I can pull out my phone, connect, login and drive! So I’m really excited to play around with that more this week and make good use of that new avenue.
Ive been applying to jobs for the past 3 weeks (hopefully looking for someone who needs the engineery skills that frc gets you) and the company I was most interested in asked me for an interview! Very excited to see where that goes.
We took a day trip to Lansing and Grand Ledge. We had a nice morning at Potter Park Zoo and then a picnic lunch and a (short) hike to the ledges in Fitzgerald Park.
It was senior’s last day yesterday, and I bought a lot of donuts. → Win
I limited myself to just two donuts. → Win
A lot of kids signed up for a new robotics course for next year. → Win
Our swerve drive modules arrived!
Summer camps have started with a roar.
The advanced design camp had half the team signup and they broke into teams and then prototyped and CADed seven different possibilities to improve the intake/scoring mechanisms for our 2023 robot – hoping to see the best of these on it for Cow Town in the fall!
Finished school and had our robotics end-of-year party. It was a ton of fun and we got to say bye to our seniors with a charged up cake.
Had a very productive week at work, despite more meetings than I’d like.
Evenings, I also had a good vestry (church parish council), Men’s Club, and investment club meeting Monday Tuesday and Wednesday repectively. I made my awesome potato salad Thursday (I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked for the recipe, and I provide because it’s totally my recipe and I’m willing to share; the key ingredient is Creole Mustard.) And finally, I smoked about 45# (20 kg) of pork Friday, and made a barbecue sauce from my yankee grandmother that has been through two generations in Cajun country. All were awesome!
You’ll have to share the recipe! Been making potato salad myself.
We had a root beer float and water rocket activities this week. It was fun and not too much effort for anyone. Hopefully we can pick up some projects to work on once we get the through leadership apps.
Above is a link to the video of it happening
I felt vindicated for something I predicted would be an issue at work (when I was told to wait it out and see what happens) . Flip side, now I have to fix said something with a month or better less time 
.
I am helping to finally bring FLL back at my school after a 3 year hiatus! We also are shuffling classrooms and now our school makerspace is next door to the robotics shop, and we are setting FLL up in the makerspace, so it should be super convenient. We have seen a huge turnout of parent interest, and should have coaches for 2 discover, 4 explore, and 4 challenge teams! I’m super stoked to help mentor, and any opportunity to add to the STEM program in my school district is a win for sure!
