March 25th: "Senior Breakfast," Flat Tire, and Robotics Meeting

Today could've been more productive.

Today was also senior skip day. However, I had time to burn in the morning, so I decided to go to the "Senior Breakfast," where the school was serving pancakes for the seniors in the morning. They also claimed that there were announcements and opportunities for people to get their grades up.

In reality, the pancakes were McDonalds hotcakes that were at most lukewarm. All the seniors that didn't decide to skip today went to the gym where they were passed out. They bought a lot so people could take several, but I didn't find them very good. There were also no announcements nor reminders, and in fact, instead of serving as a place for students to get their grades up, they wanted everyone to leave, evident in how they were contacting families for permission for students to leave. I'm pretty disappointed, but fortunately, my intent of coming here (pancakes), even though was disappointing, was well delivered.

Afterwards, I went on my family to conduct Qingming traditions. On our way coming back, we noticed that there was suddenly a frequent vibration and thud as our car drove down the highway. After making a quick stop we realized that there was a giant screw that impaled our back tire! We pulled into a more safe location before switching it out with a spare, which I was happy to help with.

When we finally got back home at around 4, I went to the robotics meeting. I'm very happy to see that we had managed to fix our drivetrain. As it turns out, it was a code issue, where we kept resetting the motor controllers, thus causing the motors to run synchronously, which resulted in the skewed driving. Since a motor on one side was being overworked, it caused it to stall and burn out. I also did a test print with faster travels to help improve our printing time, and I'm glad that it worked out well. Lots of good progress is getting done on our robot as well. We attached our algae cannon and it seems to fit in well.

Also, I'm attaching a picture of the solution I had to fix our old Dremel 3D20 printer; I'm quite proud of it. Since the limit switch wasn't properly engaging, making it vibrate since the extruder kept trying to move where it couldn't, I added some extra paper so that the limit switch was being engaged. An interesting but really cheap solution, enabling us to print more! The print quality isn't the best but I'm glad that it works. We can use it for prints that don't need lots of quality.

Thanks for reading,
Issac