Sunday, February 16, 2014

Lol. What just happened again?

So yeah... it's been quite a while without an update, so I guess I'll get right down to it.

Last semester of school pretty much consisted of me derping around in my room, eating hot cheetos, and doing PSets. As a result, not too much stuff got done. This semester, things kinda changed.

First of all, the Tesla Coil finally plays music! As a test of it's functionality and how not-blowing-up the IGBTs were, I played the entire Pokemon Trainer Battle theme on loop for a while on max power. Fortunately, the thing didn't explode! In fact, the heatsink didn't even get significantly hotter than it was before.







Ahh, the magic of low duty cycle interrupting. :)

On the more activity-oriented side of things...

I found a new home in Yale's Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design. It's an incredibly versatile space that's open 24/7 to registered students. From writing out entire PSets on the walls to passing out at 5am working on an especially frustrating PSet, the CEID was the perfect place to be.

Oh the loveliness of wall-to-wall whiteboards.

Anywhoo, while at this magical space, I joined two endeavors, the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition team, for which I'm the electrician, as well as the Flying Bulldogs - a startup/big project that involves drone stuff.

Fun times will be had.

Also, yesterday, I went to MakeMIT with my friends Noel Hwang (http://hellobowtie.blogspot.com/) , Will Zhang, and Daniel Kramnik (http://xellers.wordpress.com/). We made top 10 by making a pure analog device - an active differential oscilloscope with a bandwidth of to 1 GHz. It also has the dubious title of being the most amazingly named creation of all time


The "1 Gigahertz 10X Attenuation Active Differential Warp Speed Super Oscilloscope Probe."

At any rate, new projects should be popping up soon. Three potential projects could be a motorized scooter, a quadrotor (preferably controlled wirelessly), a tube amp, or a theremin, or a LED cube, or a BIGGER Tesla coil, or a giant death-ray robot thing that kills on sight... .

Well.

Better get to work, I guess.