Photo 365 Project - Grand Old Day

Each year on the first Sunday in June, A long section of Grand Avenue in St. Paul is blocked off, vendors set up food, drink, and random merchandise carts, and a few thousand people wander up and down the road. After a cold winter, this is serious entertainment.

Photo 365 Project - Calypso Drink

The sunlight was fading and I realized I hadn't taken a picture for the day yet. So this is what a lack of prior planning will get you. This drink caught my eye in the cooler at the gas station when I stopped for some cash (yes, I went to a gas station and didn't buy gas; I got a crazy looking drink and some money instead).

Photo 365 Project - BuzzTime Trivia

A trip to Buffalo Wild Wings yielded today's picture of the day. Again, not exactly expert photography, just a snapshot to show something that I saw or did that day.

Photo 365 Project - Ditto in the Yard

Ah, summer. And lawn mowing. Ditto seems to approve of the cut grass, it seems to make it easier for her to pick up tennis balls. She's an 85 pound 3 year old black lab, mixed with an unknown donor.

Ditto came to us from an animal rescue organization. She and her siblings, along with her mom, had been dumped in a ditch; we were told they were found when the puppies were about four days old. How do they know how old she was you ask? I did too. It seems puppies senses develop at a pretty consistent rate, and based on their development the vet hazard a guess at a number less than a week old. Puppies are born without a sense of smell, sight, or hearing (they do have a sense of touch and taste, smell and vision coming in at about 2 weeks for many breeds). Since she was 'rescued' before those other senses developed, we like to think she avoided detecting the oddness associated with such a rough entry into the world.

Regardless, we thought we could do better than a ditch, and gave her a home. Now she lives the sissified suburban life, with a (nicely mowed) lawn to play in and family to amuse her.

Photo 365 Project - Diffley Road

After the previous day's near failure to grab a picture and then resorting to a picture of grout work, I figured I'd take an "emergency backup picture" early in the day. The rest of the day came and went and the backup picture has been pressed into service. This was taken on my commute to work. Rather than the usual highway views found on a city commute, this section is rolling hills and a nice view with everything green. I've biked up and down these hills, not nearly as serene as cruising through in a car while sipping a mocha.

Photo 365 Project - Grout Repair

I almost went the whole day without taking a picture. I had spent the day at work and the evening at home scraping grout for a 'quick' repair job at the house. Not very photogenic stuff, but that's life. Some days the pictures are pretty plain when doing the routine things that keep a household going.

Photo 365 Project - Memorial Day

It's memorial day in the United States. This picture was taken at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, located in the Twin Cities. The cemetery is over 436 acres of land and has over 172,000 internments.

Photo 365 Project - Rainbow over Minneapolis

My first visit to the new Twin's ballpark in Minneapolis, and the first inning started with a light rain. The rain cleared quickly, never slowing the game down, and this rainbow appeared over the city. Welcome back to outdoor baseball in Minneapolis!

Photo 365 Project - Bonfire

Another nice night, a Saturday on Memorial Day weekend. This time we wrapped up the evening by burning things. A nice fire as the sunset and the day was complete.

Photo 365 Project - Down the Stretch

A nice evening for a visit to the races at Caterbury Downs. It is Canterbury's 25th year, I remember going when the place first opened. With the 25 year celebration, entrance is free- making for a pleasant evening watching the horses walk in the paddock then tearing down the track.

Photo 365 Project - Cat in Rail

She's not stuck, really. Apparently she just wanted to see what was "down there", below the railing.

Photo 365 Project - Door Handles

My wife and I had a date night and went to a familiar spot. Fans will recognize the door handles of this restaurant/bar chain, found across the United States.

Photo 365 Project - Cliff Road (Ordinary) Traffic

Working at my company's office, I commute along a very straight and occasionally backed up road. I snapped this picture waiting at a stoplight in one of the more jam-prone sections of road. It's significance? Nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, 20 years from now the ordinary may seem extra-ordinary. I know whenever I come back from a vacation trip and think back to what I saw, it doesn't ever seem to be the stuff I actually took pictures of. It is the ordinary stuff that pops into mind.

Photo 365 Project - Car Mirror

You may have heard of a concept that involves taking a photo once a day for a year. Here's an attempt. Some things come to mind that might help the success of this little project:

• Keep it simple. The photos are snapshots of a moment in time during the day. No hunting out the perfect picture.
• Keep the description simple. I don't want to catch myself saying "I'll post the photo later, when I have inspiration for writing the description"
• Easy accountability. I'm kind of complicating that by posting the pictures to Blogger, that's just another step (I could, and have to this point, just e-mail the pictures to myself).

The kickoff picture is a self portrait, of my index finger. In the mirror. Of my car. Showing the temp. It was actually taken with the intent of posting to facebook to get people in cold places to say 'wow'. Now it has another, more manageable purpose. Being the 365 Photo of the Day.

Robotics Team Structure

Getting Close to Robo-Time...

Robot Shipped, one last pic

This was taken well before the robot shipped but I didn't get around to uploading it. It's one of my favorites, so I thought I post it anyway. It shows the chain drive that powers the shooting column. As the moon rocks travel up the shooting chamber, each roller it encounters is moving faster than the previous set, thanks to the gearing shown here. With the creative routing of the chains, a single motor is able to power both sides of the rollers (one rolling counter-clockwise, the other clockwise).

Winter Driving Season Almost Over...Please?

I'm about done with this. And this photo was from the previous snowstorm. Since that one, we've had another that arrived at the perfect time to scramble traffic.

Robot Construction Update, Integration Test

The robot subsystems are getting close to being integrated. As a visualization exercise, we stacked the parts close to where they will be on the finished bot.

Starting from the bottom, the drive train assembly (this was taken a bit ago but provides a good "baseline")


Next comes the electronics board "drawer". This was originally conceived to be a slide out drawer for easy access, but has since been redesigned with doors around the robot allowing access to reach in to the components rather than sliding the drawer out.


Next comes the Collector. This subsystem picks 'moon rocks' up from the floor and lifts them into a storage area. The rollers seen here will be underneath a band of material the 'moon rocks' (Orbit Balls) cling to.


Finally, the shooter. Still mounted in the plywood prototype, the shooter is a geared assembly, with each roller increasing speed, propelling the 'moon rocks' out of the top. Not shown is the hood and turret assembly, controlled by a camera to target the direction the moon rocks are thrown.

Robotics Drive Test

Just a quick note on robot construction.

The team hosted a programming workshop for 5 other teams. 4 hours of coding hands-on and idea sharing followed by tours of the construction process; everyone seemed to have a good time.

Build on the robot's test frame wrapped up with a quick drive test. The programmers were testing out several different acceleration algorithms to cope with the slippery surface the 'bot will see in competition.

Robo Prep Continues...

Preparation for the FIRST robotics build season continues. A test board has been assembled and refined. Tomorrow the game will be announced, then the plotting, planning, designing, constructing and revising will begin.

For now, this is how the test board looks. The actual robot is not expected to look anything like what is seen here, this is just a test platform.