Ifoundry

Video

2009-12-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn9jqkXiOgM Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ Part 2

Gotcha

Final posting

2009-12-07T22:34:00.001-08:00

Sigh.... we have almost reached the end of the year. I would love to reminisce about ifoundry, yet I feel that is all i have been doing (at least with the staff). Sooooo... interesting fact. My close friend down the hall is taking eng 298 and is working with converting the electric car. Unfortunately due to scheduling I was not able to take that class, but now i feel kind of jelous. He is a hidden engineer. Currently he is in physics, yet i feel he is just an engineer waiting to happen. If he can randomly build towers out of silverware and make dry ice bombs he must be ready to... I feel bloom is around the right word to use. Even though he is not an engineer right now he would be perfect ifoundry material. I would hope that if he does end up switching to engineering, that even though he might be a sophomore that he would have the chance to join the ranks. Ryan Swindeman if you ever do end up googling yourself and find this, here to you.

Adruino

2009-11-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

So are Arduino is coming along well. We ordered a shield that physically mounts onto the board. It came unassembled so I had to spend a day soldering it all together. It was annoying that it was time not spent testing, but it was fun getting to solder again. We havnt had a chance to test it yet so I am hoping that I did not fry the IC chips when I was making the connections. The website has been fairly helpful. I was able to find out that there are unused analogues in so that means that we will be able to test the light. I was afraid that they would use up all of the pins rendering it only able to move but not interact.

Handy men

2009-11-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

So through out Campus there has been a lot of construction. I have seen it in process mainly on Goodwin and in Armoury. After seeing the people doing the technical work, not driving the big machines, but the ones that know how to arrange the re-bar, wire the lamp posts, do the small technical work, for several weeks I noticed an interesting thing. Almost all of them had white hair. Does this mean that in our society today, the people that actually know how to build things, fix things not from explicit instructions, but from intuition and experience are all getting to the point that they could retire? I see almost no younger men doing these jobs. And if they are, then they are the ones that drive the machines, being told where to go and what to do. Where does this leave us then when these people retire? All of the engineering kids passing by are hear to learn how to design these systems, to calculate how they will work and how they fit together. But in this field that is not as glorious and business or programing yet glues the world together, who is going into that field and are there enough people?

Compatition Day

2009-10-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

So we had the competition for the cars last Monday. Our car ended up taking second overall in the speed event. We would have won the event for the fastest starter, however when we pulled the wicks out, it caused us to burn fuel at a much higher rate. This means that the fuel that we put in did not last long enough so just as the turbine started to spin the fuel ran out. We noticed this fact and filled the fuel container all the way up to the brim with fuel. We found out with the new configuration we would burn about 1 ml of fuel every two minutes. This did give us enough power two pull in second. In addition on the burner the last wick became separated such that the flame burned from below the plastic sheathing. This will probable keep the car from running again since the wick became burned at the top and on the bottom the the plastic fused to the wick.

Reflection on iFoundry

2009-09-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

So now that we are about half way through the year I would like to take some time to think about what iFoundry has done and where I think that it should go. So far what it has done for me, besides the obvious educational benefits, is provide a good group of interested, active freshman that enjoy the same ideas activities as I do. It is nice because it really makes the class more enjoyable when you actually know many of the people and can converse on a level higher than "hi, i'm a freshman in NucE". Also it was nice because it allowed us to get a group that would actually stick together because it had the class component. This, I am hoping, will allow the project, what ever it may be, that we do in ESS to actually be something we can follow through on and finish instead of it getting started and then flopping. This is a time of change since our choices have opened up greatly, and while it can be restricting, it does provide an example of what it is like to regularly attend and work with a group in college that is a bit more formal.

As for the future I am hoping that we are not going to be tied to it for the second semester. It was great, but it also limited the other groups that we could join. I am coming from a different perspective than others though. I wanted to join EWB but found the the goal of my group ESS paralleled it so much that I stuck with ESS. Maybe it would be a good idea if the different teams got morphed or integrated into actually RSO's kind of providing a nice shoe in for more timid freshmen.

Well I need to go look up recycling for ESS so I will catch you later.

(btw this is all free writing since I am pressed for time, wanted it to be a bit more raw, and since I had a fun time free writing in class so sorry for the grammatical mistakes. ;)

The Age of Stupid

2009-09-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

So two days ago I went with ESS and another group to see the premier of The Age of Stupid. It really was a powerful movie with an intriguing lay out. In addition, the fact that it was live added to the effect because you were seeing it at the same time as thousands of people around the world. My favorite part of the movie were the speakers that they talked to live. This did not give a chance for editing, just raw footage. The interview with Ed Miliband was very hilarious and scary at the same time. Ed Miliband is the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change, and for the most part the answers he gave were all politician answers with no real substance. Fortunately the producer did not give him any slack and eventually backed him into a corner asking him why he only wanted to give the country and 50% chance, even though he said he wanted to give them the maximum chance. She also forced him to admit that the politicians were partly at fault. It was nice to see him squirm on live TV, however I fear that the audience fell on ears that already thought this.

Moving on to another concern of mine was the audience. At our theater, right next to a college where there should be hundreds of rowdy college kids waiting for a chance to protest something, it was barely filled an 8th of the way. The only people besides the pro-environment students that came with us were a handful of elder citizens. While it was nice to see them interested, it was not the key audience that I would have hoped for. Fortunately this was only one theater, but it was pitiful. To really reach America the information needs to be brought to the uninformed. The only people going to these movies are the ones that are already convinced. If clips could some how be injected into the super bowl or even American Idol, it would have a much more tangible effect then a bunch of environmental nuts crowding into a dark theater nodding a cheering about the reaffirmation of their beliefs.

Well it was fun blowing off a bit of steam, but now I've got to go study the Ramayana a bit more.

Test

2009-09-02T11:08:00.001-07:00

Just seeing how this is working. I have never had a blog, vlog, or twitter so am not used to talking about things to the general public. I do watch daily vlogs on youtube and have a general idea. I guess that the one thing on my mind is that I wish that ifoundry could cover some of the stuff that is engineering 100 like printing and labs and stuff like that. A hand out would be nice since we are spending a lot of time in class doing fun things.

I'll move onto the steam car. I was very pleased to hear that we were going to get to build something like that since I took the class research and design. Doing a project like this is great because you learn several skill sets. On the physical side you get to do material work and building what is in your head. This allows you to be more hands on in future projects, maybe for making scale models working or non working. You also get to find out that what you had originally planned, probably won't work the first time, and if it does it will probably break the next time, Forcing you to go back and find creative ways to fix the problems and really be intuitive. Finally you have to work with people and really make sure that everything fits together and everyone knows what is going on. You really have to coordinate and converse to get this.

Well, that's all for now. This test has kind of gone a bit longer than expected.