Short Retrospection and Snapshot - 10/18/2020

The most notable thing going on right now: pandemic.  Concurrent readers may find this beginning boring but that shouldn't be too big an issue.  COVID cut off the end of my second semester at Georgia Tech, resulting in a lackluster finish and me absolutely despising remote learning.  I was living again with my parents and I was low on motivation and inspiration after being removed from the stimulating environment of campus.  I had an internship lined up for this past summer and they did not cancel on me luckily.  The company, a startup, was very small and had confidence in the controllability of their workplace.  While I had grand aspirations of completing multiple goals and projects during the summer, I underestimated how much time and energy the job would take.  This was my first full-time and first engineering job for context.  All I managed was getting SOLIDWORKS certification and reading/dreaming about doing cool projects.  Another point that I should bring up is that, while my father maintains a modest tool collection, I did not have access to the vast majority of the fabrication methods that are always available to me in the Invention Studio.

Fast forward to the end of the summer; Gatech had decided to open campus for the Fall 2020 semester (making some questionable decisions on the way), but it was clear that most classes would be remote in some fashion.  I, questioning my safety on campus and despising remote learning, elected to extend my internship, which had been extremely rewarding, through the next semester with the support of my bosses and parents who I was still living with.  Some other stuff happened between then and now but this is a short retrospection.

Snapshot:

Had another nice long week at work.  Not quite the 53 hours (65 work-related hours) that I spent the previous week, but still quite long.  I just wrapped up two classes this weekend: US Government and Politics and Macroeconomics.  They are condensed classes that meet on Saturdays that I am taking at TCC so I don't fall behind on my coursework.  Literature and Composition II starts next weekend and it doesn't look like it will be a pushover like the others were unfortunately.  My parents and sister are in Colorado to celebrate my older brother's birthday and I am all alone, save for my cat, Fred, who follows me around the house all day.  He's napping in a chair in front of me currently.  The weather is steadily getting cooler and nicer.  Lately, I have been having increasingly specific thoughts about what I want to do with my life.

I acquired an Ender 3 pro earlier in the pandemic and have been testing it out, mainly with cool stuff from Thingiverse.  This past weekend I put some parts that I got for an inverted pendulum project in CAD and made a little something just to see if I could get a nice press fit on some bearings that I planned on using on my first try (calibration cube came out pretty good so I didn't mess with anything).  I started it Monday morning before I left for work, and when I came back it had stopped only part of the way through the print and was just sitting there with power, but with a blank display.  I restarted it and wiggled all of the connections that I could find but nothing would change.  I did a little bit of poking around online but to no avail.  Today I decided to contact Micro Center, where I bought it, but I wanted to be sure that it was something that I couldn't fix first.  I found the solution in the comments section of a YouTube channel.  Micro SD card had been fried and with a faulty SD card inserted into the machine, it wouldn't boot properly.  Go figure.  Maybe this is clear so some whizzes out there but it's not clear to me why faulty external memory should cause a problem like this.  Oh well.  Now I just need a new SD card and we are back in business.

That last section was a little more dense than I would have liked so I'll be wrapping up this post in short order.

I got the ODrives that I ordered in a few days ago and the cheapest, reasonably sized BLDC a couple days after.  One controller is for me and will run my inverted pendulum once I get everything sorted out.  The other is for my brother for his birthday.  We typically don't get each other such expensive gifts, but I know that he wants one and I would have felt bad just getting one for myself.

While I have ordered this first BLDC, I plan on making one myself in the future.  The company that I work for is actually an electric motor startup and I am investigating buying some of their unused neo magnets and hopefully back-irons as well.  This would save me so much effort and money.  One project in the works is what I'm calling a "low barrier of entry BLDC design guide."  One thing that I have learned at my job is that BLDC design can be as complicated as you want it to be.  There are a ridiculous number of considerations when all is said and done, many I won't be caring about for this first build.  Looking around online, I find no low-level, straightforward design guides like I could have benefitted from previously, and I plan on making one.  The idea is that you start with just a few parameters of your choice and then the guide walks you through the rest.

One last thing that I want to touch on is my new interest in macrophotography.  Wowowow.  I haven't even started and I think I'm hooked.  Cameras are expensive so I'm going to start out with the 'tape a lens to your phone' trick and go from there.  I will definitely be making a post about that soon.

Alright, first official post is done.