Snapshot - 12/26/2020
Having been almost 2 months since my last post, I thought it best to capture my thoughts in a non-technical update in order to re-focus myself before I head back to school. My internship and community college classes ended recently. Both went well. I learned a vast amount from working my internship and have emerged feeling twice the engineer that I was going in. I have also developed good relationships with many of my coworkers and hope to continue talking with many of them. I received passing grades in my community college courses which is good enough for transfer (grade is not transferred with credit) and now I don't have to waste time with non-STEM classes at GT. These two things have been taking up quite a lot of my time, my weekdays occupied by work and Saturdays by classes, but not so much time that I have had to stop working on personal projects. In fact, I would say that I have not done as much as I would have liked to given how much free time I had and this is, I think, due to a lack of motivation which needs to be remedied. I'll come back to this. Despite my slacking, I have made substantial progress on my inverted pendulum project and have a full design in CAD, but my interest in the project is waning (before I even finish!) and I feel pressure to move on and revisit it in the future instead of gutting it out now. A couple of other projects I am very interested in are designing and building my own BLDC/PMSM motor and then building a three-phase FOC based controller to control it with. These will be the focus of my efforts in the personal-project realm this semester for a couple of reasons. First, I learned quite a lot about the operating principles and design considerations of brushless motors from my internship and would like to do a follow-up project while the experience is still fresh on my mind. Second, I plan on having these projects financed (at least partially) by the GT invention studio through "maker grants" which provide funding in exchange for extensive documentation of the projects. The maximum number of maker grants that someone can be awarded in a single semester is 2 so it benefits me to just focus on these projects. The motor will be designed alongside a "low barrier of entry" brushless motor design guide (which I think I've mentioned before) and the controller will be based largely off of open-source CAD released by Ben Katz for his Hobbyking cheetah project (also related to/implemented in the MIT Mini Cheetah) with some component and layout changes. I will also be using the firmware that Ben developed initially as well. Check out Ben's blog for some fantastic projects and inspiration. His is the primary blog that inspired the creation of this one.
Alright, now to the "moving forward"-focused section of this post. For the past couple of months, I have been steadily working outside of my internship and school on what I am calling personal projects. These projects (and class mandated ones too I guess) are what the primary focus of this blog should be. And yet! Despite me working during this time, I have not made any technical, project related posts. This I take issue with and wish to change. Here are all of the possible reasons for my lack of output that I can think of:
One, I have been living with my parents for the past seven months or so and that obliges me to do tasks that I would not otherwise do.
Two, being back home and not taking classes has taken the pressure off of me or extinguished the fire under my ass, if you will.
Three, I am disinterested, whether that be in my current projects or in projects in general.
Four, I really don't have enough time and I'm not analyzing how I spent my time previously properly.
Five, I don't have the space (physical or mental) or the means to work properly.
Six, I am getting distracted.
Ok that's all I've got. Now to address them in order:
One, I am about to go back to school and, ideally, I will be there for 14 months.
Two, I am about to be thrust back into the high-pressure, but inspiring environment of GT.
Three, this is the difficult one. If I am truly disinterested then I either need to find another project that piques my interest or accept that I'm not meant to do this (though I'm not ready for that so I'm going to change projects).
Four, I suppose I just need more time-management experience for better estimation skills to determine what I should be able to achieve with what time frame. This is a critically important skill and I have been quite bad at it (most notably and recently within my internship).
Five, I certainly don't have the means in terms of tools that I do on campus, but I absolutely have a ton of stuff that I can still do, even with just a computer and some low-level hardware. And I have some cool hardware too...
Six, focus and distraction have always been horrible handicaps for me. I've floundered between trying to removing and limiting social media and video games in the past but have never landed in a spot where I'm content. At the time of writing, I'm thinking that I should block everything once more since I have shown an incredible lack of self-restraint lately. We'll see.
Hmm, well I think that's enough for now. Perhaps this post can help someone with similar issues reason though the situation. Otherwise, this post was entirely for me. Stay tuned for the motor design guide. One thing I need to get better at for sure is photo-documentation and breaking down projects into post-able segments. Thus, the first post on the motor design guide will just be the beginnings of the process.
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