New car: check

Apartment: check

petty internal power plays between my branch and HQ pushing back my start date an undetermined amount of time: unfortunately check

So I managed to line up a paid internship over the summer. I'll be working as a design engineer on automated manufacturing equipment. It's fairly close to home, but far enough away so I can't stay with my parents, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I'll be on my own, but i'll have to find a place to say and pay rent. The experience will be great and I'm broke and need money. It's a 10 week internship extendable to 6 months and I start June 20th.

I started my math minor today (focused on differential equations with some vector calculus thrown in if anyone is interested) and i'm the only engineer in the class. It feels weird being back in a pure math class, i need to get used to the notation again as get used to theory based material again. It feels kind of weird being the only engineer in the class. As I was working my way up the required math classes, the classes slowly became dominated by engineers as other majors hit their GE or

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well, apparently this is the norm now. It's 1 AM and I have a 7 AM final and i'm not remotely tired. Not studying right now, not nervous, just can't sleep. I'm normally asleep by this time and it's never a problem with finals at other times. It's really annoying, especially because I have two back to back tomorrow.

So i've been getting hammered academically this quarter. I'm not failing, but i'm not doing anywhere close to what I want to and it's only going to get harder. On top of that, I haven't been getting assorted real life things done that I need to. Because of this, I'm dropping some projects.
The watch has definitely been on the back burner, but now i'm officially placing it on hold. I'm also dropping the ROV. I love that project, but I just don't have the time to commit to it right now.

So, as it turns out, smartphone cameras aren't great at macro shots. Because of this, I wasn't able to get many good shots and won't be doing a post about the operation of mechanical watches.

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To start with, the zeppelins prototype electronics is kind of a mess. It's constructed on perfboard using jacketed wire (not sure on the gauge) to connect points, on top of that the soldering is kind of sloppy (lots of tight spaces with numerous leads). There was a vibration issue with one of the drive motors, which has been solved. when testing the motor, it shut down and the current spiked. We noticed that a part on the microcontroller was extremely hot and it had stopped working. We

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I bought a super cheap watch recently and i'll be taking it apart soon (when I get some tweezers). Is anyone interested in a (probably massive) blog going into detail about how it works? I'd be including lots of pictures and maybe some videos. I'll be doing it Monday or Tuesday so make sure to let me know by then.

So on Saturday, this just showed up in the zeppelin project locker. No one in the group knows how it got here or what it is.

The faculty advisor and club president managed to ID the part as belonging to the now cancelled Swarm Robotics project. They also recognized the led's as infrared ones, but we don't know exactly what it is, or how to use it. But no one knows where it came from. Still, it's mine now.

So last year, I competed in a robotics competition at my school and I'll be competing again this year. Two days ago, the rules for this years competition were released, so now I can get started. Here's a link to the preliminary rules if anyone's curious. Most of my team is the same as last year, although we have a different coder. I also learned a lot from last year, so this years bot

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