Week 1: Summary of events

First, your robot gif of the week.


Me... every morning



















So week 1 of my ASU BIRTH Lab internship has been quite swell. Large portions of the mornings were spent farting around on my computer and phone, waiting for my professor and graduate student amigos to show up for the day. But I can't blame them... mornings suck (as illustrated by soccer bot).

Anyways.

My first major project seems to be quite a far stretch from robots (and hence, much less related to micro-robots, or anything medical at that). I was tasked with building a highly complex structure, the exquisite form that modern engineers refer to as a table. Out of 80/20's, which by the way are "Erector sets for adults."

Hey building an aluminum table out of 80/20's isn't any simple business. There's plenty of measuring, designing, measuring, counting, remeasuring, ordering, remeasuring, reordering, you get the idea. Even over the course of one day, exactly what was expected of my table varied greatly. You could only imagine how much that design changed over the course of the week.

The basic purpose of said table, however, did remain constant. Our goal is to get a plate of salt water to swirl as we spin a magnet with a high-speed motor really close to the surface. Turns out high speed motors produce tons of vibrations. So when we mounted both to the table, the water got turbulent. Kind of hard to see any swirling if the surface is vibrating.

That's where the table comes in. With a separate table mounted on the ground, the vibrations produced by the motor will now be transmitted to the ground, instead of the table where the water sits. So with all the parts ordered, all I have to do is wait, and then build.

And I end with a very well-known cliche: it isn't the destination so much as it is the journey. And that is very true when trying to get to ASU in the morning. My fellow blogger Daniel and I have decided to carpool every morning of our internships. The first two days were spent braving the major freeways of the valley in rush hour traffic. After almost getting rear ended (multiple times), getting cut in front of, getting flipped off by a disabled man, and being chronically late, we have made the conclusion that rush hour is a no go for us fledgeling travellers. Even if I gain nothing else from these several weeks of internship, I'll be content knowing that I survived average Phoenix rush hour traffic.

Fun fact: ASU shuttles are the way to go. They're even double-deckers!