Coach’s Blog, July 3
A big welcome to our new VISTA Americorp member, Abigail Cohen!
Many thanks to everyone who helped to move our materials back to the lab from EPIC. We now need to organize the lab so it is usable and presentable for upcoming tours.
VEX Update: We had rising sophomores Neil, Nimish, Nikhil, and Divya working on prototypes for the VEX game Nothing But Net. Welcome new 9th grade students, Caleb and Shidong, and I hope we get a few more incoming BUA students this summer! We now have a GoogleGroup forum setup for them to communicate, so if you want to see what is going on, I will send you a link. The forum will be a test for a general team-wide robotics forum. We will not meet to do VEX on Sunday as it is a holiday weekend. We will pick up regularly on Wednesday at 5 and Sundays at 2 on July 8th.
Solidworks training: This will pick up Monday evening, July 6th at 7PM.
U-Design: This outreach camp run by the BU College of Engineering starts Monday July 6th at 8AM at 110 Cummington St. The camp runs for two weeks and is held in the BU Photonics Center. Several BUA students are assistant teachers. There are programs in robotics, aeronautics, and electronics.
MassPep: This also starts on Monday July 6th and is held at Roxbury Community College. We will be teaching robotics using our LEGO NXT kits.
Entrepreneurship: We are working on a season video and the annual review. If you want to be involved in the marketing end of our program over the summer let me know.
Battlebots: I enjoyed watched the most recent episode of Battlebots Sunday night. I noticed that there are two local teams. Hypershock and Overdrive are both from the Boston area. Maybe we can take a fieldtrip to go visit them! And both teams made it past the preliminary round so we will see them next Sunday in Episode 3!
Demos and Workshops: On Monday morning, July 20th we will do a workshop for the TechSavvy camp at 10AM. On July 15th we will be doing a Scorpion demo and lab tour for the U-Design camp. On Tuesday July 28th we will do a Scorpion demo and lab tour with our FRC bot for the Artemis camp.
On a personal note I have been playing with EV3 robots every night with Leonardo. He attended the Robot workshop at the Tufts CEEO this past week and now loves to write computer programs!
In the news:
Nanobots to clear arteries: On the Discovery Channel you can read about these “corkscrew nanobots to drill through blocked arteries.” They steer the nanobots with magnetic fields.
New England Patriots are Flying Robotic Drones: You can read in the NY Daily News how the FAA is nervous that the Giants and the Patriots are using drones in their practice camps. You can read about this in Bloomberg news too. They are using it to film practices.
Drone interferes with firefighting: In case you are wondering why the FAA is concerned about drones, read in the LA Times how a drone grounded several firefighting helicopters. The problem is they do not want to crash into the drones.
Agriculture drone bots: You can read in the Washington Times how Measure is using drones to try to make farming more efficient.
Audi building lunar robot: Audi has gotten into the Google Lunar XPrize competition as reported in the Daily Mail. Their robot/rover will use Audi’s Quattro all wheel drive system.
Tick Tock
Gary Garber
