Wednesday, January 05, 2005

i was in the shop for a good amount of time today making the parts for the braking system but the good news it that it is all done. all i need to do is install it in the car and let the electrical people hook it up. i am going away for the weekend to NH for the national F.I.R.S.T. kickoff event so i will install it when i get back on monday.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

1-4-05

today we were back in the barn working to setup shop. We moved all the tools and old materials to the new shop. I did little things most of the day like hanging a white board, organizing tools, etc. we also finished making sure most of the holes were plugged to keep the heat in.

i also started working on a new breaking system for the geo, replacing the slow linear actuator with a single motor and a 2.5in cam. it is a much easier solution and will speed up our breaking response time. I am planning on heading to the machine shop tomorrow with ken to machine the parts needed.

Monday, January 03, 2005

1-3-05

Well now that i am back from break i decided it would be a good idea to start posting to my blog again.

Today we work to retrofit the barn with heat. We hung metal cables around the posts of the barn and made an enclosure with plastic from Lowes. My dad came up to help install the heater and we spent the entire day building our workspace up. Look for pictures of the construction in our gallery in the near future.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

12-6- 04

10:00- 11:00 - worked on editing my letter to Bill Ford
11:00 - 12:00 - class
12:00- 3:00 - Scott Hawker from the CS department attended our meeting to discuss his involvement in the project.
Overall looked at our progress for the last week and we were satisfied with the progress that the team was making
3:00- 3:30 - spoke Sahin about a credit card for making purchases for gcart so we could buy stuff online

3:30 - 6:00 - worked with mark submitting "sponsor-us" documents to tons of compaines through sponsorwise.com

Saturday, December 04, 2004

12- 4- 04

saturday meeting

1:00 - 1:30 fillin on what we were doing
1:30- 3:00 - we broke into 2 meche groups and assigned 1 to simple designs on the emerency breaking system the other continued work with Ken on the shock mounting.

i also collected contact information for the 6 mech e's we had show up

Friday, December 03, 2004

12-3-04

9:00-11:00 I created some organization/structure for the mechanical teams figuring out the structure of who is going to do what and how leadership is going to function
11:00- 12:00 class
12:00 - 3:00 lunch meeting, talked about some EE stuff then Listed out team goals to be handed out to the rest of the team during tomorrow (Sat) meeting.
3:00 - 5:00 went hunting down information on the web about different LIDAR systems, checking out links given by previous employer direct dimensions www.dirdim.com as well as other systems by various companies

Early day Friday

Late night 6:00- 8:00 pm - went through Darpa grand challenge forum reading past entries and trying to get a feel for problems that other teams have been encountering.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

12-2-04

9:00-11:00 - worked on a design for the mounting of the hard drives in CAD
11:00-12:00 - class
12:00 - 1:00 lunch meeting discussing sponsorwise.com and our submission to enterprise
1:00 - 3:00 created/ordered business cards, researched different LIDAR systems, participated in discussion of laser and vision system goals
3:00 - 3:15 - went to look for terri stevens to ask about levels
3:15 - 4:30 - went and looked for finished my FIRST pneumatics presentation