Of note...

Well, I suppose there's been enough little interesting things going on to warrant a blog post. Most of them involve my lab at Cornell. But since I all but live there now, that's not surprising. It's a great place for interesting things, which is why I'm there! It's turning into quite a nice work environment as we continue to inhabit the new lab space. I'll take some pictures when things are complete.

Anyhow, "what's the oldest thing you've held this week?" you might (randomly) ask. Well, as it turns out, the oldest thing I've held this week is a 4020 year old artifact from present-day Syria. How do I know that? Well, I'm taking the word of the archaeologist who brought it into the lab for 3D replication, since my cuneiform reading skills are somewhat lacking. But apparently it was a dated receipt, in the form of a little clay "pillow" about 2 inches a side. This made it not particularly valuable (in a relative sense) from a scientific point of view, but it was still amazing to hold something that someone had been held and written that long ago!

Also to note, there was a Discovery Channel film crew in the lab for most of the day today, getting footage to do a spot on Evan's Fab@home project. He designed an open source 3D printer, where anyone can go online (to www.fabathome.org) and get the plans, parts list and software to make a working 3D printer, all for about $2500 dollars (commercial systems like this go for at least $25,000). It's a flexible, open source platform that may open up the world of personal 3D fabrication in much the same way as computers opened up the world of personal computing in the 80's. (And look where that has got us now!) Anyhow, there's plenty of info on the site. My contribution so far is a custom flames graphic design that can be etched at the same time the structural parts are laser-cut (under "Styling" section). There are already people building these around the world (US, Europe, South Africa, and even a professor I know back at U of WA!). Unfortunately the TV show will only air in Canada (so far), and about my only contribution today was staying out of the way of the film crew.

So besides all that, classes are still going well. I've been doing a lot of practical research into building robots (like to the point of hopefully ordering parts for my own custom automated machine in a couple weeks) so that has been fun. As part of this, I spent a couple hours tonight figured out how to program the microcontroller in a little 4-legged robot that the lab has. In that (relatively) short amount of time I got it to do a basic walking gait, so I might play around with it more tomorrow optimizing that and/or adding sensors into the control loop. Too much fun. Sometimes I wonder how I am getting paid to get an education AND play with robots.