youtube video

I'm posting the iFoundryman video from iExpo for those who want to watch that work of genius!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAsZK_bmnF4

Finals Aftermath

So my finals are finally done. I vowed to distract the people who stayed up every night playing everything from mahjong to video games in the dorm. However I found out I can't do it. When I tried, they stayed up until 5 in the morning and my body pretty much broke down from that. I'm never attempting that again. Unfortunately I also failed my calc 3 exam and so I have a c- in my math class. I'm never taking another math honors class again. O well, I get to relax until saturday and then I go home.

Finals

As my final final comes up (haha), I'm finding it harder and harder to study. Especially since I don't remember if the final only consists of the last third of the material or the whole course. On a positive note, after around 5 tomorrow, I'll be done! I had 2 finals on friday and 1 today and then tomorrow will be my last. It's been stressful but I prefer it this way even though I still can't leave till Saturday due to my plane tickets. I get to laze around for the rest of the week; well not really, I'm planning to clean up and get ready for leaving. However, I'll be hording it up over those who still have finals and were slacking last Thursday through the weekend! =P

Yu-Gi-Oh Engineering?!

So recently, I've started to pick up a trading card game that I had retired long ago in middle school. This game is called "Yu-Gi-Oh!" When I had retired from the game, it was for primarily two reasons; there was no one to play against and the game was simply seen as childish or nerdy. However, after rediscovering my old cards and deck, I brought them to UIUC for when I needed to kill time. Surprisingly, I have found many people who played or haven't ever touched it who wanted to pick up the game; even people who you wouldn't normally think played this game. What I've found is that there lies a side to Yu-Gi-Oh! that most people don't recognize. The real fun of the game is building a deck, filing it with strategies, and then watching those strategies come to life. This I find is like an engineering side to Yu-Gi-Oh! I have never seen before. Due to this reason, right now, I've built around 7 decks with the cards I have. Truely, this children's card game has an unchildish side to it.

Hovercraft fail

Ugh, this projects been frustrating. We've fried one arduino board, one motor shield, and a snes controller. Now we have to go with the hovercraft controlling itself. After frying all that it was pretty scary to see the arduino take in a lot of current and no voltage and then start smoking. Luckily, nothing was damaged. We don't have proof that it worked, but it did work with the snes controller controlling it. Next time, we'll be sure to wear anti-static wristbands!

Microcontroller project

So I haven't posted in a while due to being extremely busy. However I felt like talking about this one project going on now. Right now, iFoundry's class has a microcontroller project nearing completion. My team chose to make a hovercraft. Unfortunately, We've been having problems with the electrical work of the hovercraft. First we couldn't draw enough juice from the microcontroller with the breadboard, so we made a motor shield. Now the motor shield doesn't even work properly. We're at a complete loss of how to use the motor shield but hopefully we'll figure things out tomorrow ...... actually today!