There was no school today because it was MLK day today, and we were supposed to have extended meeting. However, I forgot the time that we were supposed to get there, so I just housesat after dinner.
Today, we got together and Mr. Miller taught us some more about how to use Google Sites to develop our websites in the place of html. Since I am using html, I ignored the lesson for the most part, and worked on getting my website up to date. During the lesson, I also found an app called anWriter that made it so that I could access and work on my website from my phone. Durng the FRC meeting, we split up to work on whatever we had been doing for the past few days.
anWriterToday, we had a Wednesday Challenge where we were tasked with moving a golf ball from one brown paper bag to another, without touching the ball or the bag, using only the materials provided to us in a ziplock bag. My team was composed of myself, Erin, and Hunter. Since Hunter was in last year's winning group, after fooling around for a bit, we copied the winning design, and proceded to dominate with a total time of 20 seconds. At the end of the period, one of the other teams that they had completed the challenge with a time of 18 seconds, which made us really loud and salty, but it was a joke. Since there was no FRC meeting today, I just worked on some work in preparation of my upoming SAT on Saturday.
Wednesday Challenge 2: Ebola
Today, Garrett brought his fountain pen and showed it to me during period 2. The pen was a Pilot Custom Heritage 912, which costs about $180 new on Amazon I got to play around with it and take it home to do some maintenance on the feed and the con-70 reservoir, which is a really cool piece of fountain pen tech. The way it works is that instead of using a piston or a squeezed rubber tube, there is a button that makes a temporary airtight seal and a slight vaccum in the reservoir, and when the button is depressed, the ink flows into the reservoir. Unfortunately, the con-70 is too wide at the top to fit into my Pilot Metropolitan, so I guess that either a con-50 or a syringe-filled Pilot cartridge will have to do. The first thing that we did during period 5 was to look at the results of the past 2 Wedesday Challenges. For the cardboard square challenge, Connor and Paul's group was the winner. For yesterday's Ebola challenge, our group was the winner, with the second place group finishing with 1:01. However, because our gruop was composed of only veterans, Dr. Neato made an executive decision, and the second place group won as well. After ging oer the results of the Wednesday Challeges, Dr. Neato showed the new people how to make a home page and link it up to their Semester 1 and newly created Semester 2 websites. Since I already had an index page, I just worked on improving it/cleaning it up by linking it to my css. During period 6, we had Mr. Waters as a substitute, so after taking the 1 question quiz that we had today, i finished my homework. Also, during the period, I got a notification saying that my second Pilo[t Metropolitan, a red one this time as compared to the silver and snakeskin one that I got during the weekend, along with the con-50 that i was going to put into the silver Pilot Metropolitan, had been delivered. When I got home, I did some maintenance on Garret's Pilot Custom Heritage 912, put the con-50 in my silver Pilot Metropolitan, and then refilled both with ink. During the FRC meeting today, I practiced using Autodesk Inventor by finishing my bumper from a couple of days ago, and then making a rough model of a key. Although the program is quite different from Sketchup, i feel that I am getting the hang of it, and can move on to doing something that is actually productive. When we got back together in the last 30 minutes to review what we had done, Sam told the group that the best option for the volume configuration of the robot was the wide and short one, which could potentially hold more balls. For programming, Ryan and company manages to get a camera hooked up to a computer.
Today, we had our weekly FRC presentation, discussing Sam's robot prototype and the chosen size constraints. Afterwards, we worked on our websites and stuff. During the FRC meeting, Tony got the attendance recording program up and running on one of the laptops. After recording attendance, we split back up into our respective groups and worked. For the most part, I was just practiccing CAD on Autodesk Inventor. Today was pasta night, so we had pasta and meatballs.