Realm of the Imponderable

Death valley

Was down there the last 3 days touring the sights that mother nature prepared for us over the course of.. hmmm.... 12235237 years? Breathtaking scenery and unique landscape features, and sunsets and sunrises (*grumpy grumpy draggeed out of bed*... ooo sunrise)
that no mortal could hope to reproduce... the list goes on.
Death valley is supposedly the lowest point on this hemisphere, about 200 feet below sea level. (If you don't know what a foot is, look down) It used to be a dumping ground for rivers and such and there's huge mineral deposits on the ground, which means in some places if you aim the camera right the salt comes out looking like snow. Then there's mountains to hike up and sand dunes to roll on. (now try doing that in reverse... roll down mountains and hike on sand dunes... *bad*)
There was also a dried up lake bed called the racetrack cos' of the rocks that leave tracks on the ground as they slide along, so it looks like they're racing. Personally when I hear "racetrack" and see this huge, empty and airport runway flat piece of ground in front of me the first name that pops to mind is Shimmering Flats but meh... that's just the geek in me.

Will post some pictures when I have the chance. Till then, tata!

Month of Madness

Last month was pretty hectoc, what with exams and projects due. I had 2 projects to finish up, one of which was my senior design project in which we had to build a walker that walks on its own 2 legs in a particularly humanlike fashion. If you want to see it in action click Here and select the video. If you're a geek like me and want to know more then look at the other 2 items there.

So it was a metric crapton of machining to do in the shop, discovering a lot of new things you can do with a mill that I never thought you could do, and of course the inevitable mistake here and there that you have to fix and / or cover up and just make the stupid thing work.

The other project was on a control system. We had to design something to control the speed of an escalator and make it work just like a normal one, making a few assumptions here and there to make the thing a little more realistic. So what we cane up with was a nice PID controller that switches on when someone steps on and switches off if it detects no new passengers for 30 seconds. Sounds simple, till you think of all the little details that go into it, and apply the "engineering aproach" to figuring out exactly how much or how little of everything the system's supposed to output.

K enough of the geek stuff. BTW if you don't know the difference between "geek", "nerd" and "dork" check this out.
I get kinda peeved if someone uses the wrong term on me.