It’s Friday. Woo.
We got some really cool news out of HQ this week, so there was that - anyone else got anything cool?
Made some progress on the FTC scale swerve I’ve been playing with. Roughly 12 hours of printing including the TPU treads. Need to order the motors/gearboxes, servos, and axles but I think I like how this turned out.
Two of my work projects are closing in on completion. Both got fully assembled–one as a test and one for reals–for the first time today. I commented to my boss that next week was going to be a dirty one and we’d either be mourning or celebrating.
(You don’t want to wear clothes you want to keep looking nice at my work place when we’re testing projects. Even with all our precautions, concrete gets everywhere.)
Finished the first full week of school!
We got a wall torn down last year and we finally finished cleaning up the lab and getting ready for the new members. It took around 5 meetings over 3 weeks to get it this far (we are not close to being organized yet).
We had our interest meeting for the new members and we had around 20 new people show up, along with around 30 existing members. Let’s hope these people stick around.
Had about 30 new students show up to lunch meetings and “sign up”. Our Club Rush is next week, so may get more kids then. Highlight was a 9th grader asking, “Can my dad’s company donate to the team?” I think there was a collective, “Uh, yeah!” from all the returning members.
The team held basic training sessions for two more groups of new team members.
For the second session, one of the seniors asked to teach and got another senior to help. They did admirably well.
Had our returning members meeting, and participated in an open house at our school. Hopefully with good results.
Got to play around with the old robots.
Since our shops currently down, no-one knew where the battery’s were, so we couldn’t power the robot for a basic light-show sort of deal. I was messing around with our 2016 bot, and trying to see how the electronics were wired, and ended up discovering a battery from 2017 inside the robot. It still held a charge, and worked, so we put it in our 2022 bot, but we hadn’t re-flashed the radio since worlds, so we still couldn’t do anything. Oh well, got this picture:
I had a really nice work lunch last Saturday
Then we went out on the Bosphorus on a boat for a couple hours.
I also have been doing really well at walking a lot, As of today my monthlong average daily steps are at 17.000/day, which I’m very proud of. I’m trying to pull it up to 20.000.
Also two more people started this week at my office, which I’m extremely excited about. Growth continues. We continue to be able to reach more students 
Today I spent the morning with mentors and the evening with alumni, and hearing their stories… 
It’s been a pretty nice week for me really. Busy. I have been out of the house from basically 8am to 10pm I think every day this week, wether it be me staying late at work, or going to the gym, or evening meals with friends, a good busy.
Picked up an absurdly perfect compact cassette deck I’d been looking for, for almost nothing. There’s a solid pound of discrete electronics for the amplification circuitry and a completely mirrored PCB for the left and right channels. Looks like there’s a total of 4 boards in here, no way anyone could make this for under $3-400 today.
Using one of those cassette tape adapters I’m getting around 3% error vs the original file. Wow and flutter is trash, but a new belt should deal with that.
Been a down week, for certain. But grandma (90.5 yo) was able to get her hip replaced after a fall, and surgery went well. Gotta appreciate all that modern medicine offers, now onto recovery.
I met some coworkers I’ve been working with remotely for a while now in-person for the first time. You don’t know the good things till they’re gone! And, trying to plan for more of this in the not too distant future.
Built four out of my five FLL field setup kits. This would be a win, but I’m waiting on the USPS to deliver two missing pieces for kit four that put me at a standstill. Maybe next week!
Planned and booked a Champs-style trip in 72 hours time for the national conference our SWE chapter is attending in October. I feel lucky to have been able to nail down all the moving parts of flights, hotels, and metro passes on my own in such a short time span for such a short turnaround of a trip but I miss having @SurfGear and an army of other adults help out with this kind of thing 
Thankfully all that travel planning experience as a student is finally going toward something 
Now to reread the Champs advice thread from last year and to refamiliarize myself with downtown Houston.
I ride a 1997 Honda PC800 (aka Pacific Coast). Our group requires that any milestone (50,000, 75,000 miles etc…) must have the miles that were on the odometer added to said milestone.
My PC had 2852 miles on the odo when I bought it. It now has 177,852+ miles on it. I have put 175,000 miles on it since I bought it.
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