I begin this post at the conclusion of what has been arguably the most difficult week of my college career: Dead week. One would think that the name would conjure feelings of dread simply by the name, but such was not the case for me. In reading and hearing descriptions, I pictured it as a time when no activities were scheduled, nothing was due, and students could devote the entire week to rest and preparation for finals week. But how wrong I was. At my latest calculation, I have generated 25 pages of academic content over the course of the past week in the form of three papers. But they are complete, and I now enjoy (or at least experience) a brief respite from this stressful time before launching into what seems to be the second-most stressful week: finals. I would have expected it to be the other way around, but then there are many things in life which are not as we expect them, a fact which we must learn not only to accept but to embrace. For predictability is the enemy of brain development, a worthy goal which I believe I share with most other students here. Isn't it fun to take a statement like that and generalize it to a philosophical statement so deep that you could drown in it. Imagine what this post would be like had I begun it last night after finishing my engineering final paper, by far the longest of the three due this week. Not all of that paper was written words, making the 15 pages (all written in one night, per my usual strategy, although not so far in advance as I would have desired) not quite so intimidating as they first appeared. Yet not all pages are created equal, and perhaps the largest single portion of time was devoted to the two pages at the end which contained the design sketches. A bad artist, and possibly an overachiever, I decided to once again create a 3D model in Sketchup from which to generate top, front, side, and isometric views of the device and ramp. At first, this was not so different from my experience with the midterm report, for which I had created a similar model (and for which I lost the original file, although the designs were sufficiently different that it would likely require more effort to modify that design than to start over from scratch). However, as I progressed, I discovered that this was a far more difficult task as I was emulating reality rather than giving form to an imagined design. And our device contained far too many individual strips of wood to have been created with 3d modeling in mind (which it wasn't, although as a partner in design I should have ensured that it was). But I did successfully complete the model and the remainder of the paper.
I also have another piece of good news to share with you, my loyal readers (and I suppose for those of you who have are just discovering this site as well). As the competition is complete, I am now fully free to speak of the nature of our device. I could copy paste the much longer description from my final report. But I believe that it shall suffice to say that our device consisted of a plow with hinged arms, which pushed sandbags up and off a ramp which facilitated stacking. In the first round of the competition, a gear stripped out in one of our motors, resulting in a sickening clicking sound rather than full control of the device. But thanks to the dual motor arrangement, we managed to collect 20 bags (although stacking was impossible) and advanced to the second round (thanks to Alec having called time 5 seconds early, which served as a tiebreaker. In the second round we earned 25 points, successfully stacking 3 bags - a record, from what we hear. We came in 4th place overall, a placing with which we are happy and which is far beyond our expectations. I could continue, but I have class to prepare for, so I shall leave you with several thousand words and one link. Do with them what you will, excepting of course including them in your own paper, claiming them as your own, the above is not a legally valid license, etc etc
Credit to Alec for this sketch of the ramp
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If you would like to see the device in even greater detail, you can download the sketchup files (as well as the application in which to view them) from A Pilots Productions. And thus concludes the thousands of words, the one link, and this post.
Credit to Alec for this sketch of the ramp
