This semester has been amazing. After an amazing summer studying European art, architecture, and music, it's been a bit of a transition back into my core mechanical engineering courses--but a refreshing one at that.
One of the most exciting ME classes I get to take this semester is ME2110, formally known as "Creative Design." While the rest of my classes have been calculation based, this class is nearly all project based. We started off the semester building spagetti towers; then, the past three weeks have been spent learning the objective engineering process through finding the best solution to transporting water from rivers to villages in 3rd world countries. This past Thursday my team of 4 handed in our final project report, so it's time to start our final project: a robot that will end up competing against all the other teams!
This lab had two objectives: Design a mounting bracket in a CAD software that we'll need for our project, as well as learning how to code the controller for the robot. I started the first objective thinking it was just a quick review of CAD--but then our TA walked in with our parts made from a waterjet! It's one thing to model something in CAD software, but then to actually feel it makes the connection between the lines on your screen and the real world. 
Our controller for the robot was our second objective--using PBASIC programming to do certain tasks--like controlling DC motors and pneumatic arms with push and lever buttons. I thought MATLAB was rewarding in CS1371, but this is even more so. When your code doesn't just churn out numbers on a screen, but actually performs tasks--it starts becoming less work and more fun! That's what I love about this class--it takes everything I've been learning for the past three semesters and puts it into a practice. Until next time,
Joshua
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