Hello all MicroMousers.

This week we finished several demo boards. We should be done by Friday, Nov. 6th, along with a flight plan of the workshop. The new members have been working their asses off with the soldering jobs. Even though a lot of them are having trouble with it, everyone is being very helpful and attempting to move forward. Soldering PCB boards isn’t a skill you can accomplish in a day; for example it took me around a year’s worth of work to be able to solder decently. But remember, working on electronics is supposed to be fun! Sometimes, we might spell SUCCESS as S-T-R-E-S-S-F-U-L, but, we can not give up. Long hours in the office, putting time into your work will show later in your career as an engineering major. Other than working on hand soldering our workshop demos (pictures will be up soon), we have started our discussion on our rover. In order to develop a robot that mimics a simpler version of the Roomba, we have debated about the issues at hand: sensors, actuators, chassis, micro-controller, but, the most important thing is what we want it to do. Without a purpose for the robot, we cannot move forward in any direction.

In next weeks meeting, we will have a discussion and minimal workshop time. We will be discussing about the current project at hand, and in order to understand how we should build the robot, we will find out what we want it to do. Then, we can start developing a body for the robot and researching what we should use. I cannot emphasize how important researching is! Without research we will not learn anything, in a world where everything comes easy for us, we must learn of our own accord. With the search engines and all of the resources available to us, it makes me uneasy how people would rather ask someone to figure out the problem for them. Have some pride, figure out the problem yourself! You WILL learn more than you need to, but that knowledge is something invaluable in your life. Well, enough of me preaching to the choir. I will end my rant with this quote.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Alva Edison

Well, back to work everyone…
Bryant Trinh