in the summer nights is nice.

- J.

posted in photos term | 0 comments

About two months ago, Laura and I decided to bike across the country this summer. This past week, with words of advice from many friends, we bought bikes and gear, and had a three-day adventure to my hometown in Jericho, NY. Our route took us to peaceful pastures, stunning lakes, beautiful rivers, and showed us a part of the east coast that not many get to see.

The first day took us from Boston to Providence, along the blackstone river bikeway, where we stayed with Amber (a friend of mine from MITERS). The next day we made it to Mystic, following the washington secondary trail for a good portion of the ride. We stayed with Laura and John from warmshowers.org, who were wonderfully kind to us and shared their cache of touring knowledge with us over an excellent Mystic dinner. On the third day we rode over to New London, took the ferry to Orient Point, and biked along NYS Bicycle rte. 25 as far as the sun would let us (~60 miles). My parents picked us up when the sun went down and took us home, safe and sound. You can see our route here.

The trip was incredible, and we both can't wait to go cross-country this summer!

- J.

posted in bicycles touring photos | 0 comments

This morning was our last adventure in taiwan. After exploring for a couple of hours, cathy's uncle drove us to taiwan international airport for a family meet-up/goodbye at the terminal.

In other news, we're going to shenzen!

- J.

posted in asiatrip photos | 0 comments

With only a few hours of sleep, we were woken up by Cathy's Uncle and the smell of warm soymilk entwined with scallion pancakes. Breakfast was excellent.

I'm tired so I'll edit this later, again. Eyecandy for the weak!

- J.

posted in asiatrip photos | 0 comments

We made it to narito!

Dinner + sleep + breakfast at cathy's house recharged our excitement capacitors and prepared us for the 13 hour flight.

I'll update more if I can find internet... but here are some pictures!

... We made it to Taipei early on the 23rd, just in time to catch the last bus going towards our hostel. We ended up getting a ride from a beat-up taxi - and its driver - to make the last haul through taipei and up to the International House. Rainy Taiwan at 1AM reminded me of the dystopian neo-tokyo from neuromancer. I wondered if a few chips would fall out from behind our driver's ear.

- J.

posted in asiatrip | 0 comments

As of 23:00 last night, cathy, nancy, jullian, and i have embarked on a cross-continental trip to the orient. So far, we've caught a bus down to New York, traversed two railways from chinatown to jfk, and flew cross-country to seattle, without a hitch.

While waiting to see if we'll get on the next flight to narito-tokyo (we're flying standby), I figured I'd upload what pictures I've taken so far.

I'll post more later once we know if we will get on the flight to Narita, Japan today.

- J.

posted in asiatrip pictures | 0 comments

It's that time of year again... Work piled up on the procrastinate stack starts to tumble as the semesterly bulldozer makes me finish it before the 14th. I still have >10 assignments to do, including five labs and three essays, not to mention a piano performance and a design problem presentation.

Okay. Here we go.

- J.

posted in term | 0 comments

I purchased an Aoyue 2600 soldering station in October and hadn't had the opportunity to use it much until this past week. Though the iron itself is nice - the unit heats to 350 degrees Celsius in less than twenty seconds, the adjustable temperature works, and the replacement tips aren't horribly expensive - it has one irritating flaw: the buzzer. For some reason, Aoyue designed their station to beep - ear-piercingly loud - every time the iron has reached its set temperature. After ten minutes of working with the iron, the beeping gets real old real fast, so I decided to retaliate.

I split open my iron and desoldered resistor R31, which pulls the negative side of the piezo element down to ground through the atmel microcontroller - no more buzz! I was playing with the value of R31 for a while, but couldn't quite find the right resistor value to barely turn on the piezo speaker. After sewing the unit back together, I realized that I could have put in a low pass filter with its pole somewhere around half a decade below the buzzing frequency, but perhaps that's for another day.

- J.

posted in projects photos | 0 comments

I went home for Thanksgiving and caught this awesome photo just as I was exiting Penn Station on the way back to Boston.

sun is awesome.

- J.

posted in photos | 0 comments

I know the entry and comment views have been flaky over the past week or so. It took me a while, but I finally figured out why.

I'm using django as a web programming framework for this website. I've written my own blog and project documentation platform applications, and a photo gallery application is in the works, but I borrowed the comment and RSS feed system from django itself.

I recently changed the way that entries are linked to the interwebs. Prior to this week, the url for this entry would have been muffinator.mit.edu/blog/29, since this post is the 29th post. Now, the url looks more like ...edu/blog/fixed-comments-and..., which is much more sensible! Stupidly, the comment system was still trying to render a form linked to the former url, which was causing it to throw up.

So yay, no more throw-up!

- J.

posted in improvements | 0 comments

Last week, all of my pants started ripping simultaneously. This week, armed with a spool of thread and a needle, I retaliated.

- J.

posted in projects | 0 comments

After the release of an instructable detailing an Inkjet direct-to-pcb conversion, Dan Fourie and I thought it would be way more awesome to convert a laser printer to be able to print directly onto copper clad.

Inkjet masking is cool because you don't have to deal with the delicate process of smushing plastic dust (toner) onto metal, but it also has several flaws. For one, you need to purchase and replace the ink in an inkjet cartridge by hand. The difficulty here is that cartridges range wildly from printer to printer. Secondly, the process isn't clean - results are often pitted and inaccurate due to etchant eating away at the printed mask.

Laser printer masking is cool because toner is an excellent mask. It doesn't dissolve in ferric chloride or cupric chloride, and you can buy an entire toner cartridge from the store for any laser printer. Additionally, the print time is arguably faster, the possible resolution is higher, and the traces printed are extremely accurate - it's possible to print out 2 mil traces! Also, contrary to popular belief, there's no issue with laser printing on a conductive surface. All of the fancy charge depositing, optical neutralization, and toner patterning is done on a special photoelectric film wrapped around the heating drum, so the copper won't repel or destroy the image. In fact, printing on folded aluminum foil works extremely well! On the other hand, copper clad board... well... see below.

Over the weekend, Dan disassembled a laser printer that he found in the trash. He was able to tear it down to the point where he could fit a board in the (quite linear) print path and gave it a go. To his dismay, the board jammed and nicked the heating drum. I came over and we decided that by removing a metal guide and chamfering the edge of the circuit board, we'd have better luck - and we did! The print quality turned out pretty good, but the toner wasn't fusing to the board. We figured that it was either a heat/pressure issue or a charge issue and called it a day.

The next day, Dan and I went to miters to improve the process. We tried a whole slew of ideas include charge compensation, increasing roller pressure, and pre-heating the boards to get the toner to fuse. The last one did the trick. Although print quality isn't 100% there yet, we're certain that we can hammer out those last pixels and get this process rolling. We etched my first lab in 6.331 - a 4MHz 50-ohm line driver with 2 watts of output power.

More to come next weekend!

- J.

posted in projects photos term | 0 comments

I've added this sidebar thing to hold all of the images that I'm referring to in my post. It ends up reducing the time it takes me to write posts with images in them!

Hopefully that means I'll post more in the future... Hopefully. I'm still working on an automatic crop function, but that will come soon enough.

- J.

posted in improvements | 0 comments

I drew up a MITERS logo one day, then Vincent Lee vectorized it.

- J.

posted in miters pictures collaboration | 0 comments

I found this fortune in my pocket

- J.

posted in photos | 0 comments

I finally got CHDK - the canon hacker development kit - working on my newish canon sd4000 is. Naturally, the first thing I did with it was take and make a timelapse of my moss. So, without further adieu:

Life's pretty messy right now. My moss keeps me sane.

- J.

posted in projects photos term | 0 comments

I found myself listening to Cut Chemist's the garden , which is an ethnic mix of someone jamming on a berimbau, ukulele, some light bongo/congas with the occasional tambourine and orchestral rises and falls. This is all the background to what sounds like a woman singing in Portuguese, which shortly melts into the background as a drum set takes over with some phat beats. The song is fantastic, catchy, and memorable. The lyrics come from Vinicius De Morales's song berimbau, and are quite powerful.

Anyhow, I'm writing about the garden because it almost instantaneously brought me into a flashback of when my friend Billy Gordon and I ran up onto a roof to light off some fireworks in the middle of the night. We'd found an older man playing an exotic instrument - I can't remember if it was a barimbau or a didgeridoo - but he'd been playing for hours while his wife was tending to the roof garden. We'd talked to him for a while about music and the good things in life, and when there was nothing left to be said we bid him good night and headed downstairs, fireworks still in-hand.

That was a night of mishap, costumes, and hanging out with older people that I'll never forget.

I miss sf.

- J.

posted in thoughts | 0 comments

I found myself asking what might be the most important question in the rest of my life while brushing my teeth in the bathroom. Just before, I'd watched 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' - the incredible story about the evolution of street art and the man who filmed it all. It made me think about what I was doing now, and what it meant of my future. I'd always seen myself as an artist - a sculptor of the world. My work would be prolific, whether it was through science, technology, art, or written word. Now I don't care so much about acknowledgment - but I've found a deep desire for the production of real, heart-encompassed, work. I find myself stumbling up the stairs to productivity, trying everything along the way - drawing, painting, music, synthesis, photography, observation, sport, reading, science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, web programming, even moss cultivation, for nothing's sake. But at this point I've come to realize that the place I'm at isn't conducive the combination of both scientific and free-medium arts, despite the existence of my neighbor: the Media Lab.

I see a barrier between the arts and the sciences - not one of discipline, simply one of perspective. Both fields wish to create ways for them to explore their spaces. The sciences wish to learn more about the hard universe, and push themselves further by utilizing what they have to date. The meaning in their work stems from a desire to understand, describe, and manipulate the natural world. The arts find spaces around them that are created by a junction of the social and material world. They utilize physical and cultural medium to create meaning in their work. Both are beautiful, pure, and filled with passion to find meaning in something that isn't there yet. An artist can become a scientist by inquiring about the world, and in doing so conduct and experiment through their medium of choice. A scientist can become an artist by crafting their process or findings into a context where technical knowledge isn't required to find meaning.

There Is one significant difference between the sciences that I am currently pursuing and the arts that I so desire to produce; Engineers tend to create technologies that empower artists to explore more and more and more spaces. So, I find myself asking,

    "AM I A USER OR AM I A CREATOR ?"

I guess I'll have to think for a while.

edit: check out jellyfish's response

- J.

posted in thoughts | 0 comments

I ran into a little girl and her mother on my way to New Haven to celebrate j.'s birthday. Sitting next to each other, we couldn't help but interact. Smiles turned into a language-less conversation. Eventually, she coaxed my mind into being creative, so I made her these little capacitor|resistor people.

She loved them :)

- J.

posted in photos | 0 comments

So I meant to add the dream that I had two nights ago. I feel like I won't do it justice, though, since my mind isn't fresh from waking up. I'll paraphrase and move on.

I was in another country, most likely Scandinavian, and found myself amidst a crowd of people riding fancy racing bicycles. They were practicing their pedaling strokes, and I felt the uncorrupted urge to join in. One of them fell off their still-standing bicycle after riding over a bump, which then begged me to mount it and start riding. I pedaled lightly but quickly accelerated, wind flowing through the track of long hair that remains attached to my newly shaven scalp. The spring air provides a cool contrast to the smiling rays of sun that beat down on my head.

After the wondrous world around me had flooded my head with dopamine, I found myself behind a cabin that was facing the sun. My hand dug into my pocket and pulled out a large orange felt-tipped marker, freeing its tip from the cap's shelter in the process. I made my mark, a muffin, and continued to work out a tree; then enclosed it in a circle. My eyes shot to the sky, and with a sharp breath I was off. I noted that several were following, but in turning my head, I found a hole in a fence that I'd decided to squeeze through on my bike. Jumping through, I find myself amidst a group of construction workers who were displeased with my acrobatics, to say the least. I figured it'd be best to talk myself out of my problem, so I did. After some accidental mishaps, I was outside the fence again, but only to be confronted by an officer of the law looking for the criminal who had marked up someone's house. Though he, too, would be persuaded by my hippie-esque ideals. I suppose that moral of the story is that people are people, and if you can put them in the right mindset, they might agree with your logic, no matter how dirty of a hippie you are.

- J.

posted in dreams | 0 comments

I had an urge this morning to begin describing my dreams on my website. Recently my dreams have been vivid, filled with interesting and heartwarming situations and interactions between humans. Somehow I'm able to turn hatred or accusation into wonder, inspiration, and love. Nothing can stop me from making the earth that we live on a better place for everyone. But that's all in my head, when my eyes are closed and I'm whipped off to a landscape a third of the way around the world. When I'm back here, I suppose I just want to document everything I do. But there's no time for that.

Anyhow, I decided to write a tagging application, and that's just what I did this morning - in the past 10 minutes nonetheless.

Also, it's snowing! Happy Wintertime!

- J.

posted in improvements dreams | 0 comments

7.23.22PM | I just finished off the majority of my classes for the semester. I'm ecstatic, roadkill buffet is in 30 minutes, and I've accomplished so much this week.

Unfinished version of eyeris.

9.29.26AM | Sorry I'ven't been updating. Work just sort of started piling up like I was integrating a freaking step! It seemed like it'd never end, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm going to make a few lightning posts with pictures and maybe a sentence of text. Hope you like!

photo-blogging FTW!

- J.

posted in projects photos | 0 comments

Today was a fantastic day! I spent the morning waking up, getting a lab checkoff for the 5MHz bandwidth, 74 dB (That's a gain of 5000!) six-transistor discrete amplifier that I built for 6.301 [solid state circuits]. That went pretty smoothly, which was fantastic! I could've sworn I'd get docked points for what apparently was actually noise! Anyhow, my next few classes came and went. I learned how to design/build a brushless DC motor, and figured out how I was going to bring my iris aperture goggles to fruition. I'll draw up a CAD model tomorrow, I promise.

Anyhow, today was the robot killers' first game! It went fantastic! We have above minimal attendance, and four players who hadn't played hockey in their lives! We were passing, shooting, defending, and stealing the puck from the other team! I can't believe how well we did this game; plus - we even scored a goal! I even scored a goal - it was my first goal ever! I'm really happy with the robot killers this year. We're going to kick some serious robot arse, and have a hell of a blast doing it. Oh, I almost forgot to mention - we even had an active audience! My hallmates came to cheer us on!

I wish I had a camera at the game, but alas - mine's dead. Instead I'll throw up the .asc (lt spice model) for my amplifier :)

I realize you might want the netlist too ;) schematic/.asc is here

Now to floss my teeth... so much for the 10PM bedtime.

- J.

posted in term | 0 comments

So I've been trying to stick to a strict 10pm bedtime [so much for that] because I seem to be more productive in the bright morning than in the dark night. I really love waking up with the sun, birds, and trees, especially nowadays. Winter skies are the most beautiful of them all. The clouds are crisp and the colors are as bright as they get. Even on days like today, where the sunny sky is obscured by cold, grey clouds, there's nothing like looking up when you're even just a little bit down.

Anyhow I should get back to my bedtime schedule. Maybe tomorrow I'll tackle brushing and flossing my teeth ;)

Check out this giant's head on my wall:

With dreams of killing robots,

- J.

posted in photos | 0 comments

It's been a long two months of listening, learning, thinking, and tooling. Term's going pretty well, but I keep finding myself behind on my work. I've since dropped two classes - operating systems engineering and cellular biophysics, but it's quite alright - I've got a huge workload as it is.

I learned how to design transistor-level low-noise/high-gain/high-bandwidth/resonant amplifiers, buck/boost/flyback converters and class-D amplifiers, the guts of the canonical digital rf communication system, how to shoot, cut, and edit videos, and how to cast wax in plaster. My art class is going really freaking well, I love it! Check out this sweet 'handleabra' that I made:

I'm also working on a couple of new projects, even though I haven't posted more about typo yet. I found this pretty neat iris aperture in the garbage over the summer, and I'm finally turning it into a mechanized blinking monocle. I hope that I'll be able to make it respond to stimuli like distance or ambient light, but we'll see how far I can go with that. - it's due in two weeks, so I don't have much time.

Ice Hockey's starting up! Our first game is this tuesday, and I'm SUPER excited! I'm the captain of the Robot Killers, and I can't wait to kill some robots!

Time is short, but life is long. I'll try to update more often, maybe just posting pictures and short text.

Hope you had a happy halloween!

- J.

posted in term photos | 0 comments

Wow. Term is going to be incredible.

I seem to have chosen some of the most interesting classes that I could possibly take this semester. Modeling the cell membrane as an electrical system, designing a transistor-based high-ish carrier wave frequency rf transmitter, learning the ins and outs of modern and eccentric operating systems, getting solid-state circuits down, and then putting powah into 'em. I'm so glad term's looking up.

Today I had one of every class, then ended up playing settlers of catan with jay, eric, and the llk crew in the ML, then hung out with my friend cathy after our 'lab introduction' seminar for 6.301. Hall Rosh-Hashana turned out to be a blast - a huge number of people from around the dorm came. Relaxing, refreshing, and terrifying - MIT is.

Well.... hope I'm not too far in over my head. I'm going to need to start drawing again.

- J.

posted in term | 0 comments

It took me a while to figure out why time seems to slip by faster as you get older. I'd convinced myself that the chemical reaction rates in our brains slowed as we aged, decreasing our temporal resolution. Knowing nothing about neuroscience, I am probably wrong - but I may have found another answer.

A couple of semesters ago I was playing with the idea of 'large quantities of time' and methods of displaying large quantities of time without indicating smaller quantities of time. I came up with a leaf on a stick taking a random walk around its axis, with probability close to one that it would make one revolution between 50 and 90 minutes in. The desired effect was a slow-migrating leaf that would only appear to move if the viewer was observing over large intervals of time. When the viewer is occupied by distractions, time passes, and is recorded by the movements of the leaf. I noticed that similar phenomenon occur daily.

A static cloudy summer sky was captivating me on my daily travels when I noticed a squirrel in a tree. Soon, people, music, doors, and machines. I'd almost reached my destination before I'd pay attention to the sky again. And then, there was nothing. Only the color blue.

I sort of just wanted to reflect on how the summer went by incredibly quick, probably because I was so busy most of the time. i think the longest day of these past few months was when my great friend jay took his wife jodi, jeff, and i to walden pond. There were no distractions there. Only sun, beautiful mother nature, and time.

I also have been meaning to post an update on those projects listed on the homepage. Without further adieu:

typo

Is finished! I completed typo last week. He's got full bi-directional communications over the air (xbee wireless transmitters) and can be used to print out ascii pictures of people's faces or whatever you want, used as a computer <-> typewriter bridge for the instant messaging of the 80's, and can even be used to play text adventure games like zork! I'm extremely happy with the stock-look of typo, and couldn't have asked for a better typewriter.

plasma speaker

Is also finished! I can play music over a tens of kilovolts spark gap without blowing up my circuit or power supply. Apparently I should be able to modify my circuit to make it louder without consuming more current, but for now I'm pretty happy.

I'll be making two posts on the projects page detailing both the builds shortly, and hopefully they'll look nice too!

I'm getting tired, so I guess I'll just post my class schedule for the coming semester (tomorrow): 6.021 - cellular biophysics 6.131 - power electronics lab 6.301 - solid state circuits 6.828 - operating systems engineering 21M.460 - senegalese drum ensemble

If I'm lucky, I'll also take 6.978 - rf systems and circuit design

Man, term's going to be awesome!

- J.

posted in projects term | 0 comments

The past week has been pretty hectic.

Work and work and volunteering and work and time that slips through my low-pass filters without the slightest bit of regret. I started to value my time even more than before. I realize now that I can't help everyone in the world if I don't give myself the time to invent the things that will help them. This summer has thrown at me too many offers to obtain a commodity that I don't necessarily even want, yet I have taken almost all of those offers up despite neglect for my own interests.

I've worked for Vishwa Robotics in a sprint to develop some seriously awesome hardware (that apparently is secret), helped a senior @ Suffolk college find a way to implement his final project, shown a draper employee the way of the modern microcontroller [avr and c], and for some reason I can't seem to tell anyone that it's time for a change. People tell me I'm too nice - though whether or not that's true is up to you.

Regardless - a feeling of production, centering, understanding, and completion has overwhelmed me. Thus, today I have crossed the p-n junction of that barrier in my timeline. Today will be the first day in a while for josh/muffin/souvs and josh/muffin/souvs only (mostly). So where do I begin?!

Well, I'm done with Vishwa Robotics for the semester, I'm studying for my 18.440 (probability) final on wednesday, I'm finalizing the VCO topology design today for olopede, and I think that's a mouth full of work to do for today. Yeah. This is going to be awesome.

So, catching up:

I've made some serious progress on Plasma Speaker: Yesterday I got 'm to SPEAK! Turns out line-level inputs aren't what this guys wants, and he needs some serious amplification (10V peak to peak!) in order to be loudly audible. I'll build an op-amp audio amplifier for him in the next few days, but for now you should just sit here salivating on the prospect of listening to tens of thousands of volts breaking down across the air that you breathe in just the right way, coaxing the cilia in your ears into giving you an aural orgasm. Pichures/video coming soon.

Typo's going wireless! I found an FTDI board that I made a while ago the other day, and Charles donated a couple of zigbee radios that Limor donated to him. Typo thanks to both of you for the radios and the lack of wires going through his skin.

I moved back into senior house yesterday (after sleeping on one of our GRT's couches for the past week) and it feels awesome. I'm so glad to be back, and I have a feeling you'll like it too. I'mma be sooooo productive at my own desk!

Marty and I made a collaborative drawling last night:

Welp, that's it for now!

- J.

posted in projects photos | 0 comments

For the past week I have spent hours upon days slaving over a total of two 'automatic' digital typewriters. After blowing one of the buck converters on the first typewriter's main board - killing his 8052 uC in the process - I have since found hope in another typewriter - the IBM Wheelwriter 1000.

The wheelwriter is a modern beast. It can remember what you have typed, and even delimits words by spaces. You can correct letters, words, or lines at a time, and even re-print everything that you typed in a single session. It has autocorrect for when it mistypes a character (it recognizes that its timing was off and beeps + uses correction tape to fix its mistake), and even does spelling correction on its own.

Like I said: BEAST

Anyhow, major progress has been made. I give you: typo

Definitely more on typo later. I'm also close to getting images to be happy in that little sidebar space you see to your right, and being able to upload them directly from my admin interface. This means more images coming soon. For now, feast your eyes upon typo typing on a mobius strip.

- J.

posted in projects | 0 comments

To my delight, on friday I found two beautiful, fully functional, typewriters. They were sitting on the N51 loading dock, just a skip away from MITERS, abandoned and sad. They had no chance in the world until I came along. I adopted them.

Enter: Francois and Typo

Francois is a super-old-school electronic typewriter [insert model here] that uses a DC motor and a ratcheting drive shaft to isolate the keys that you push from the hammers that strike the paper. I reverse engineered the entire machine with my friend steve from MITERS in an afternoon. The mechanical tab and margin mechanisms are super elegant and industrial. Mechanical design back in the day was so awesome. I'll try and post pics later.

Typo is an old-school Smith-Corona [digital] electric typewriter model 5a. He's got some super-awesome features like electronic tab/margin set, a replaceable typeset wheel, and correction tape. But get this - He thinks like the eighties. Know why?

He's got intel inside - but not just any intel: the 8052. The 8052 is from the same family as the 8051 - the canonical microcontroller of 'ye olde days' (ie. the eighties) but it's still in use today. Anyhow, the p8052 comes with internal EPROM, which you can erase/reprogram by exposing the silicon die to UV, but our little die has no way to see the outside world. They forgot to give him a window!

Regardless - the 5a is SUPER hackable. The stepper motors and sensors all have headers that you can easily unplug from the main board and plug back into your makeshift controller. Or, you can hack into the keyboard header and 'play keyboard' while sniffing the character data bus. This would let you talk to whoever's typing, and even interrupt their keystrokes! Add a usb port and Typo's ready to print out your term papers in super-flashy typewriter text. Add a webcam, image to ascii converter, some interactive fiction and you've got yourself a piece of art!

I'm about halfway done with TYPO. I ordered more carbon trace cable headers for the main board because I toasted the existing one in the reverse-engineering process, and have already talked to him from a microcontoller. I'll post pictures/a more detailed write-up (instructable?) as soon as I can figure out how to write a picture platform and have the time. Video of Typo is coming soon.

If you'll be at MIT for REX/orientation, drop by the MITERS booth during the ASA activities midway to get your picture typed by Typo!

Also, Maker Faire RI and Maker Faire NY are coming up. OLOPEDE is going to be there, are you?!

- J.

posted in projects | 0 comments

I've finally finished the blog application!

Now I'll be much more likely to update this thing! I mean... think about it - If I don't update from here on out, I'd have written that whole blog application from scratch for no reason whatsoever. Man, I'm excited.

Things coming:

• j.'s blog interface
• pictures
• tags
• comments!

Awesome! I'm going to go work on olopede now!

- J.

posted in improvements | 0 comments

It's been a while. Mostly school to blame, unfortunately. So here's the deal - last summer I made a bulleted list of what I did each day. This summer I'll be making a brief post every day and include pictures when I can. I suppose so far I'm a week and a bit late on posts, but I have excuses for most of that time. I'll update the past few days in this post, though.

Yesterday I taught my high school's AP Physics C class to intuitively grasp the electron cloud geometries of different orbitals. We started with electromagnetic waves and walked our way down into simple quantum, eventually solving for the wavefunction of a quantum well. From there, the rest was simple mental manipulation (rotation into the third dimension). After class I took the chinatown bus from NYC to Boston and arrived at tEp around 7:30. Alison, Carlos, Juan, and I watched Star Wars V until the wee hours of the morning, then I went to sleep on the couch in 23.

Today I woke up at 9, washed up, then went to talk to Eric and Alec at sprout in Davis Sq. regarding a potential job for the summer - working on a smart power strip. Turns out that there is no funding for the UROP, so I'd have to be contributing as a volunteer. They offered to let me use the space if I'd like, though. I'm almost certain that I'll take them up on their offer. I headed back to senior house from Davis and hung out with my mans Nick Wang and Thom Goff for a bit. I picked up my bike and brought it back to tEp, plucked out a few links from my chain for good measure, and went food shopping with Steve and his friend at trader joe's.

- J.

posted in | 0 comments

I just watched some of the videos @ the symphony of science, and I'm in an awe of inspiration. Knowing that the universe is my predacessor makes me want to learn more about my heritage. I want to investigate the cosmos and the physical universe. I want to talk to my ancestors.

'We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.'

Sorry about the lack of an update. I'm positive that I'll be updating more often now.

Cheers,

- J.

posted in nature | 0 comments

I've made lots of progress on the cotton candy gun. It's fantastic! I haven't been keeping a good log, but here's what's gone down to date:

I made a rough CAD model in solidworks a few days into January, which was used as a 'flexible template' for the rest of the design process. Soon after, I got parts from Home Depot: a few 1" diameter copper joints (two T's and an elbow), plus an absurd assortment of adapters in order to bring a 2" diameter PVC pipe down to a 1" diameter copper one. If possible, I'd like to keep this gun as 'open' as possible - meaning easily accessible parts and plans, hence buying materials from Home Depot.

After assembling the plumbing parts I realized that some additional work had to be done. They just didn't feel 'right', the id of the 1" pipe is actually 1.12" - which didn't sit well with the 1" feedscrew, and most importantl: there was no heat insulation! The original plans called for a 200 degree celcius heating element hanging around some copper tubing that would (eventually) lead to your handle. A major, temperature-sensitive, redesign was in order.

A friend suggested a solution: Teflon. For the moment, this was the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Was this a go? - a straight shot to glory? The celebration was too soon - the dump truck filled with all of the unsolved puzzles in the cotton candy gun universe had just arrived. Days went by as my MITERS pals and I solved each problem, one-by-one. Each solution opened up new problems, but as the suns kept rising, the problems became easier and less worrisome. Eventually, I decided to start CADding again. Oh, and I ordered some 'Virgin Electrical Grade Teflon' (PTFE) rod from McMaster-Carr (1 1/4" diameter).

- J.

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'P.' is a place where I'll keep track of my ongoing efforts to create what the world is lacking. This is my first post.

In addition, it's j.'s birthday! Happy birthday j.!

- J.

posted in improvements j. | 0 comments