To begin my Monday, I designed a D20 Die. This shape of die is an icosahedron, which means it has 20 faces, hence the name D20. It is most commonly used in a fantasy board game called Dungeons and Dragons where a group of players take on roles of fantasy characters to quest through a storyline. You roll different dice to choose what your character gets to do. There are different dice with different amounts of sides: D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20. I decided to design the D20 since it looks the coolest and is the staple die of the D&D world. Although I don’t play yet, I will definitely be designing the whole squad of dice, and forcing my friends to play when I return to Montrose. Once I finished my model I sent it over to the library to be printed, and left for the day.
On Tuesday, I worked with Zhidi in the morning learning her version of the REA code. I also used a new method to plan it out, which was to write the code on a white board first. I really liked this method because it was easy to change the code and easy to visualize, not to mention it was 20 times less stressful since the computer wasn’t yelling at me every time I got something slightly wrong. Once I had the code all planned out, I copied what I had written into my code.
After we grabbed lunch at The Union, Kevin and I hopped over to the library to pick up my D20 as well as some models I had found last week. The prints I had found last week on ‘Thingiverse’ were really cool and theoretically able to move around but stay together. One didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, but I plan on slicing it correctly and printing it again soon, so stay tuned! Anyway, the other model from ‘Thingiverse’ is a star inside stars. The stars interlock and can extend to a pyramid shape, or twist and move around in itself. It also makes a super cool noise when it moves.
My D20 die also turned out well! I am definitely considering it a prototype though, because it was smaller than I expected, the numbers need to be bigger, and one of the sides didn’t come out super well, but it’s still a super fun trinket.
When we returned from the library, Adriann and I got to work wiring the sensors to the Arduino boards, the bread boards, then the micro SD card modules, and then the LCD display… There was so much wiring and a ton of trouble shooting and copy and pasting with code. What also made it more difficult is that although we had sensors of the same model, all four of them were different versions, and so the wiring and troubleshooting was different for all of them. When we finished for the day we had done all the work on the sensors that we could, and we decided to pick up the next morning with some finishing touches.
On Wednesday morning, as planned, we continued wrestling the sensors into working shape. Finally, just in time for lunch we got all four working! They don’t look too pretty, but they work so it doesn’t matter.
After a break for lunch we got into the lab and I disconnected the LI-COR from its place on some crowded cardboard, and moved it to a nicer, cleaner piece of cardboard. If I haven’t mentioned before, the LI-COR is a very high quality sensor that the McPherson Lab has worked with before.
After the LI-COR was settled, we conducted a very unscientific, thrown together experiment. By that I mean we placed two low quality sensors in the bottom of a bucket, as well as the LI-COR, shot different gasses with different PPM (parts per million) into the bucket, and then compared the results between the low quality to the LI-COR. The LI-COR is a vey big box with a tube that intakes the air to test the quality, so to get the gas levels from the bucket we connected a very long tube, and then held the intake end in the bucket.
As you can see, the white tube that I’m holding connects to the LI-COR, and the black connects to the gas canisters. The gas that we tested was 550 PPM and 1400 PPM. We recorded all the low quality sensor data on micro SD card that were connected to the Arduino boards, and we thought we recorded the LI-COR on my computer. As we found out Thursday though, the extremely old software had only recorded blank note sheets.
Anyway Thursday morning, I worked with Ting doing some preliminary tests. For these we also shot different gasses into different water mixtures. One being just water, the other a mix between sand and water.
With this experiment we’re hoping to see that we don’t need to filter the sand. Filtering the sand would entail sending it to another lab, and waiting even longer to start our actual experiment, and at this point in my internship, I don’t have much time left. So we left the gasses running, I believe, for this whole weekend, and I’m hoping for good results Monday.
After lunch, I started analyzing the data we had taken from the Bucket Experiment, and was annoyed to find that the LI-COR software had not recorded the data like we had thought. I was still able to compare the low quality sensor data to each other and for the most part its very similar! Some differences include where the data lies, but the curves are the same, so one can assume that the data is the same but the calibration is just a little off. Without the LI-COR data though, we can’t see how off they really are. And so, we plan to meet with Aaron to figure the software side out on Monday.
I learned about a new holiday on Friday, called Pioneer day, which is a Utah holiday that commemorates Mormon Pioneers settling in Utah. The holiday is actually celebrated July 24, which was Saturday, but most businesses take off Friday as well, and so did we.
So Friday, I celebrated with Ramen and Bubble Tea from Cafe Yugo, it was delicious!!!
I was also reading books like crazy and so I went to Barnes and Noble to restock. I also realized that it’ll be dangerous for me to live close to actual bookstores once I go to college.
On Saturday, I continued reading my Barnes and Noble haul, and just hung out. On Sunday I went to Lagoon, an amusement park, with my wonderful host family.
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