And now the moment I've been hinting at

In at least one of my previous posts, perhaps more (but no more than three) I have hinted at an upcoming post on my team's ideas for our device for the Freshman Design Competition. Well, this...isn't it. I am sorry to disappoint you, loyal readers, but I cannot allow the mission-critical secrecy of our design to become public knowledge at this point. However, the process by which we have been designing is far from secret. My team so far has been managing to remain within the recommended time periods. Today is the date on which the midterm reports are to be turned in. While that event is in the future for me, the limit of the tense will approach the past as the number of minutes left in this day approaches zero. So I will make the statement that I turned in my paper today (known true for all time after 4:00 PM). Anyway, semantics about tense aside, the significance of that event is that our design concept has been temporarily finalized. To explain that apparent contradiction, that is the design which we will attempt to build, but all bets are off as to what will happen once we enter the testing/debugging stage, which should begin shortly after fall break. This finalization also meant that were able to build begin to build with at least a modicum of confidence. And so we did, beginning yesterday afternoon. We didn't get extremely far, but we do now have two wheels on a platform with all the related electronic paraphernalia such as receivers and speed controls. We are currently experiencing some issues with our speed control, but otherwise construction seems to be going well. Already though, we have made a few changes regarding the orientation and positioning of components. Fortunately, I modeled our initial design concept using SketchUP (the last letter isn't supposed to be capitalized, but it seemed too opportune a typo to fix), a task that required additional effort at first but proved invaluable in the creation of our report (it is much easier to rotate a 3d model than to manually draw multiple sketches). So changes to our design plan should be simply a matter of dragging components. But I digress - my point is that we have no need to fear small changed in design. We know what we are trying to build. Only time will tell what the final product will look like. Insofar as the classified nature of our work permits, I will keep you updated on our progress toward that final goal.