Gary Garber's Blog

In BUTODAY there is a nice new article about the new College of Engineering specialization in Robotics.  BU does a lot of work with drones and quadcopters.

CAD Workshop:  This coming Monday at 7PM at 15 Saint Mary’s Street.  Please sign up in advance on the doodle: http://doodle.com/7c6qu29rt45mh34c

Tech Savvy Success: We gave a nice workshop last week to the girls from Tech Savvy.  Photos on the way. 

VEX Work: I was very pleased to see the great condition of the lab!  This is the kind of cleaned up lab which makes me happy!  Things are looking better and I will now order some toys.  Let us try and keep up with the engineering notebook and use the forum to document our work!  Many thanks to Nell, Evelyn, Courtney and whoever else helped to clean up the lab!

Comms issues on Scorpion:  After our last demo we realized we had some serious comms issues.  Many thanks to Dave, Paul, and Michael for getting Scorpion ready for our upcoming demonstrations.  It is on the list to get a new laptop for running the FRC robot.

Artemis demonstration:We have a Scorpion demo for the Artemis camp on Tuesday July 28 at 2PM.  Meet up at the lab.

Tour of the GE Aviation: The GE Aviation tour will be Friday August 7th.  Please, fill out this doodle  if you want to attend. Again, only US citizens (including green card holders) are able to attend. At this plant, we design/assemble/test F404 engine, F414 engine, T700 engine (Apache and Blackhawk), new presidential helicopter, and many more!  Sign up ASAP!  This will be a fun group field trip. Alums are welcome too.

Boston Scientific Demo: We will have a tent we are sharing with FRC 4905 (Andromeda 1) and some FLL teams.  August 18th from 8AM to 2PM.  Boston Scientific has been a great sponsor for us and we really want to give back to them!  You should have received a G-calendar invite to this event.  We need to get names soon for badging purposes.

Boston Green Fest: Friday August 21st or Saturday August 22nd Scorpion demo: We have done this several times.  This might also be a good opportunity to clear out our remaining inventory of FIRST LED Light Bulbs.

Boston Children’s Museum TinkerTent on Sunday August 23rd.  It promises to be a whole lot of fun, with thousands of families filtering through and seeing our great work.  This year we will be joined by the MIT Media Lab, Einstein’s Workshop, The Design Museum, The Revolving Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, The Eliot School and more organizations.

BU FIRST Calender: Now that BUA students have official BU google email accounts I will be using g-calender to schedule our meetings and demos.  Please respond to your invites.

We had a great first day in U-Design's Flight School.

We began the day by having every student making a paper airplanes.  Although this might sound simple, the challenge is to see whose plane can stay aloft the longest time or the longest distance.  The hope being that by the end of the week, as the students' understanding of aeronautics develops, so will the performance of their planes.

We then build White Wing Racer.  This are high end paper airplanes with a balsa wood core.  They are designed by a professional engineer and when launched with a rubber band can stay aloft for over a minute.  You can by a White Wing for about $5.

Next we build Guillow Sky Streak.  Guillow is actually a local company.  They are well known for selling promotional foam glider airplanes in addition to the rubber band balsa wood airplanes.  Although the planes we build today are a simple 5 step kit, we will modify them as the week goes on and design our own planes.

We next began working on the Guillow Cadet Planes.  This is a very complex plane which will take easily three days to build.  Following the directions is critically important.  Many students gloss over the directions, and will make mistakes (but we learn from our mistakes).

Morning Lab Tour to visit Professor Jason Ritt from biomedical engineering.  Professor Ritt is investigating sensory perception.  My own son, Alejandro is taking U Design this summer.  Alejandro wanted to know if they could develop tools to create Daredevil, which by coincidence I just started watching on Netflix.

We had a few brief lectures today on the physics of Flight and basic Aerodynamics.

We had a special guess lecture today from Jeff Ventola who is the developed of the Wicked Wing Flying Thing.   He is a local inventor who invented a new type of frisbee that can easily be thrown over a football field in length.  I read about Jeff in the local newspaper.  You can buy his flying disc online.

On the other half of U-Design, Alejandro really enjoyed himself in Robo Alley, and was excited to start learning to program in C.

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

Beantown Blitz:Yesterday we performed well at the Beantown Blitz. We were ranked #8 going into alliance selection with our new rookie driver Nimish at the joysticks.  We were on the 6th seed alliance with 5122 and 5563.  And we won the Excellence in Engineering Award.

Our first meeting for VEX will be on Sunday, June 28th in the lab.

Today I got to visit Gillette stadium and Patriot Place.  I was being interviewed as a finalist for the MA STEM teacher of the year.  While in the lobby, I noticed the playbill for the first Boston Patriot's game which was played at Boston University.

After the interview, I had to buy some LEGO Minifigures.  Here I bought Gronkowski for Leonardo.  Alejandro got Edleman, and I gave Brady to Catalina.

One of my favorite exhibits at Patriot Place was the LEGO Pat's helmet.

The STEM panel interviewing me (from the left in the above photo) included Katie Cross, Education Director for the Hall at Patriot Place, me, Allison Scheff, Executive Director of STEM at the Department of Higher Education and the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council, Keith Connors, Senior Program Manager of the STEM Pipeline Fund, and below in the red Patriot's shirt, Bryan Morry – Executive Director of the Hall at Patriot Place.