Okay, I tried to preview html, but chrome was blocking the popup, so I allowed popups for xanga.com, but I forgot that enabling popups refreshed the page, so I lost what I already wrote. oh well.
I really should be doing my diffeq homework (last homework before finals!) but I feel like sharing. It's been forever since I posted. I actually started to write a long post a couple weeks ago, but I got interrupted and by the time I got back to it, the moment had passed.
List of things I want to talk about (because I'll forget otherwise)
So most of you already know I made the finalists for the prom dress contest. The contest actually ended almost a year ago (wow) but I never actually saw who won until today. I'd like to think that's mostly the company's fault for delaying the results for so long. I actually checked the contest page regularly for a couple weeks starting when they were supposed to announce the winners. Duh, of course I did - the point was to win the thing. Oh wait, I had already gotten that rejection letter. Never mind. Right, now I remember why I had such mixed feelings about seeing the winners. I was already feeling the typical loserly feelings - some regret, some bitterness - and I didn't even know if I wanted to see who had beaten me.
Thankfully that's all water under the bridge now. The winning dress is really spectacular, so I'm glad she won. Some of the others, I think, are a bit out of my comfort zone...especially the duct tape one. I guess duct tape art is cool in some cases, and I guess it's pretty handy when you've got nothing else around, but I kind of hope the it gets phased out soon.
Anyway, I'd really like to finish that dress now. I couldn't go back and alter the same dress, mostly because I want to preserve it as it was submitted to the contest. For memories' sake. But the bigger (and probably much more practical) reasons are that 1) it was incredibly tight when I made it (the zipper actually failed me when I got to prom), and I've definitely gained weight and 2) ...well, a lot of other things. Construction details, and errors from rushing - I made a poor choice for the lining fabric (too hot), the pattern could use a lot of adjustments, the embroidery wasn't stabilized correctly on the skirt, all the feather outlines were marked in various things that'll never wash out.
So what I'm trying to say is I'd like to return to my original design and sew the thing properly, from scratch. I don't know when I'd wear it, but there are supposed to be two symmetrical birds with fancy tail feathers all the way down to the ground.
I wonder if Mrs. D ever saw the picture. Considering how much she buys at Joann, I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe she's too old to see the website though. I'm sure she'd be offended that I never told her, the lady who (formally) taught me how to sew. Oh well.
2. iGEM
My flopper of a friend here convinced me to work on iGEM over the summer with him.
http://2011.igem.org/Team:Columbia-Cooper/Team
It's a collegiate competition where you mess around with bacterial DNA and try to make them do useful things. I know I swore off biology a long time ago, but I really needed something legit to do over the summer, and I can get 3 credits for this. I should have looked for internships earlier so I could be doing something more relevant to mechanical engineering, but that's ok. I've been led to believe that there's machining to be done anyway, so maybe I'll have an excuse to get out of the lab and hang around the machine shop.
3. gumball machine
Been working on this thing all semester. It's for my Principals of Design class, where everyone has a different sort of ridiculous, un-finishable, self-designed (to some degree) engineering project. One group was assigned to compete in Punkin Chunkin (so jealous, except they're kind of dysfunctional). I got put in Arduino games. Basically, we (my partner and I) were given an Arduino microcontroller board and told to make something fun. So what did I do? I went way overboard and designed something I couldn't possibly finish in time for final presentations. That's okay though, because I've talked to my professor about finishing this over the summer, so I'll be getting credits for this too.
Probably the best part of the project was using the laser cutter so much that I got granted access and training to the coolest machine in the coolest lab at school. Now I can cut whatever I want! Except for my own skin, because that's not allowed. Toast, however, is allowed in the laser cutter as long as we all promise not to eat it. Not that we would, because it's gross.
see more of my project here! http://dap.cooper.edu/doku.php?id=start:classes:principlesofdesign:arduinogames:gumballmachine
4. BWKS
Good news about band! The Brooklyn Wind Symphony is under such huge demand for open spots that it's opening up a second group. The idea, as put by our director, is to have enough spots open never to have to decline anyone who's willing to play. Something about being able to feel those same goosebumps they felt while playing in high school or college band. It's true - you know you're in a good place when the music sends chills through your body. It's a noble cause, and I love the organisation all the more for it. I'm also glad because the opening of another group will mean some of the current players who don't have the time/skill/energy to keep up with the more intense music can opt to play in the less demanding group, leaving the core group tighter and more efficient.
More good news! One of our highest goals, those powerful motivational tools, is to get an invitation to the Midwest wind band clinic. I didn't even know it was open to non-high school bands, but I guess they have an adult category. Also, David Maslanka.
5. finals
Finals start Thursday for me.
Physics: I'm totally unprepared, but everyone's telling me that I can still get a solid C in the course even if I bomb it on top of everything else I've totally screwed up in the course so far. Meh.
Vector Calc: teacher can barely speak English, so tests are totally straightforward. Got an A on the first test. No worries.
Pchem: Hardest course so far. Got a C on the first test, left the second one in tears. I don't understand entropy :( Luckily, test #2 wasn't as bad as I thought - got it back with a 68...after a 10 point curve. Not bad. At least I'm not in danger of failing anymore. Pretty solidly in the C range, unless I do really well on the final. But every student ever has hoped for similar last-minute miracles. Who knows? At least I don't have to take anymore chemistry...except that thermodynamics is apparently pchem all over again. oop.
DiffEq: Also a bit over my head. Got a 47 on the first test (and indirectly shamed in class about partial fractions). 82 on the second. Professor has nifty rule that you can't do worse in the course than you do on the final. Still not sure if that's an actual rule, or just a neat generalization.
Can't believe freshman year's nearly gone, and can't wait for the summer.
6. art?
Art. Sometimes I'm extremely jealous of my artist roommate for being able to spend so much time on art. Not so much when she's forced to spend all her time on art. I hope there's some happy medium, some balance I can strike. That's almost entirely impossible with my class schedule, though. I often wonder if I'll really pursue engineering past college. I know I can do well as one, and I know there's good money in it, but I also know there are tons of other ways to spend my time.
One path in particular I've been thinking a ton about taking is kinetic sculpture. I want to make art that moves, public installments that grab passersby out of their walks, contraptions that blow your mind and whose complexities take much more than a passing glance to take in. Luckily, the city crowd is appreciative of that sort of thing and I have a laser cutter at my disposal and the whole summer to explore new things.
...now back to homework. There's less than a week left and a huge mountain of work to pass before I can go back to being an art fart.
IDISCLAIMER: It's been too long, so I don't think I can finish writing this post because I've got too much else to write about. Oops.
Played another concert today in Brooklyn. I totally take back all my ranting and raving about the group not being musically satisfying. Despite the trouble we sometimes have in getting off the ground and settling on a unified sound, we really put together a good show and pulled off some great music. Now all we need is to get more people in the audience than there are on stage...which I think we did today, actually. I haven't been in the band for that long, but it feels awesome seeing our audience grow every concert. I'm getting the feeling that I've just entered the group at the start of a huge upswing in its development. Apparently in 2008 (surprisingly recent!) when it was founded as the Grand Street Community Band, the band was half the size and not nearly as skilled. Guess I'm lucky in that respect.
And as a bit of proof for just how legit we're becoming, here's an interview our director conducted (heh) with David Maslanka: http://www.sequenza21.com/2012/03/conductor-and-composer-discuss-resurgence-of-wind-ensembles/
exciting, right?! None of my classmates are very impressed, though, because modern wind band music isn't exactly mainstream. Still, my uber bandfag friends ca
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distractions! i'll finish later
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Anyway, my uber bandfag friends appreciate the godliness that is David Maslanka's music. I'm listening to a pro recording of one his wind quintets on spotify (which is amazing, by the way), and the it's literally making me ache inside. There's nothing like sitting down with some trusted players and a tough piece and getting so intimate with
spent they day at the cooper library today, studying at a little white desk in the shadow of a bookcase. occasionally got up to wander the aisles. started wondering what happened to those years past when i'd visit the public library, go home with a stack of books, and come back a couple weeks later ready to start fresh. realized that the cooper library, while small, is packed with amazing art and engineering books at every turn (what else would there be?). took out an old volume on printmaking.
i remember staring at my collection of redwall books, stacked in chronological order on my bedroom bookshelf at eye level, struggling to decide which one to read next, because i had already been through each one several times. why did i let mom give them away? :(
It's finally done and (mostly) working! We spent all of Tuesday sitting in the EE lab and furiously debugging, eventually scrapping some of the original design in favor of simpler solutions. The goal was to make it as presentable and playable as possible by the time class started, and it worked :D The game is a bit clumsy though - you need to push a button to preload the cave, then flip a stupidly small DIP switch to enable collision detection. And the cave up/down shifting was supposed to be random, but I couldn't figure out how to stop the cave from looping around pacman style if it hit the edge of the screen...so the cave is just a simple zigzag, which is a little disappointing. We are, however, planning to keep working on the thing even though the project is officially over. For funsies.
The whole circuit, minus the display. t's huge! But not as big as some of the other projects.
Shift registers make it a side-scroller game
Cave generator and obstacle generator. These feed the rightmost LED of each row
Collision detection stops the game when you crash. Helicopter demultiplexer...controls the helicopter. Potentiometer (the little knob) is for game speed control.
Startup circuit clears the display of float values and starts the cave off at the right width.
Schematic here: CLICKKKKKKK. I'm really not sure if I got the resistor values right, since our dorm closes right after class and I had to go home, then work off all the crappy pictures I took before I left.
So what did I learn? I got real intimate with obsolete, finicky, decades-old technology that's way too expensive and hurts when you step on it. It's a bit like trying to build practical things out of legos. I mean, the course was fun as an introduction to circuitry and for puzzling over 1s and 0s, but everything we did in DLD could be done in way less time with an arduino and a few lines of code. No regrets, but never again. Anyway, I'm home! I get to relax for a month now, and maybe get a head start on physics.
I haven't really posted in a while because 1. I've been swamped with homework and 2. xanga isn't one of my go-to procrastination activities. Anyway, I've taken all but one of my finals, so now all I have to do is finish my last DLD project and take the one last exam, gen chem. Speaking of finals and DLD...my DLD final was 3 hours of absolute rape. It was designed that way intentionally, of course, which means the teacher doesn't really expect any decent grades on it, and that the point was to test how we handle ridiculous time constraints on impossible design projects. Like real engineers, right? Of course, the though still wasn't much consolation when two hours had past and I had only 40 points worth of questions answered. But that's ok.
So I meant to post here when I actually started the last project because i thought it'd be interesting to track its progress, but since it's due in 4 days I can't really do that now. Here's what we have so far..
Alex and I are trying to make the helicopter game where you click to rise and release to fall. The original Jetman. The green column represents the helicopter; the red array is the cave tunnel thing.
Breadboard to proto-board inputs
Each rainbow thing controls a horizontal row of 8 LEDs. Those chips make the cave move to the left across the screen. Being the smart girl I am, I wired the first three rainbow things backward, then realized my mistake and wired the remaining thirteen...backwards again. So ALL the board connections have to plug in backwards. I flipped the wire order AND the color order, so none of my beautiful color coding lines up >_>
Underside of the proto-board. Alex did all the soldering work over a couple days
Dual universal bi-directional four-bit shift registers, which are SUPPOSED to create the cave based on a pseudo-random number generator. Of course, neither subcircuit is working properly
Helicopter controlled by 4:16 demultiplexer addressed to a 4-bit up/down counter. I mean, if you're into that kind of thing. Nand gates at the bottom are for collision detection. You hit the cave, you lose.
Pretty lights! If there's time, I'm making an overlay for the display that fits each LED into a box topped with diffuser paper, so there are nice little square pixels.
