Bottle Rockets

This week in robotics we started working on our soda bottle rockets and well let’s just say it is going very slowly. The soda bottle launcher proved to be a bit difficult to build since we didn't let the glue dry on the PVC pipes making not hold any kind of pressure. It held a bit of pressure enough to blast the rocket but it didn't get very high. We also tried various sizes of bottles to see which one would travel the most distance leaving us with a poor demonstration. That good thing though is that we now know what not to do which will help up in the future. Everyone else should watch out because Josh and I our working on a special rocket that should theoretically blow everyone away but I can't give out any more information because it is top secret.

Calibrating the probe that I'm using wasn't as difficult as I thought well when you find the manual it isn't as difficult. Now that it is calibrated I will be able to start collecting data to help my experiment which I have been working on for almost a year.

Estrella mountain student conference is upon us, at least the deadline for the abstract just passed. I submitted my abstract on time and I will do an oral presentation. I signed up for both an oral and a poster presentation. Matt suggested that I should do the oral presentation because he thinks I will be able to get first place based upon the presentations that we viewed during last year’s conference. I am a bit scared and at the same time a bit motivated to do the presentation. The reason for why I'm scared is because presenting to a large group of people is somewhat stressful and also trying not to finish the presentation with "so umm yeah" which a lot of people tend to do.  

Not so great

The past couple of weeks haven't treated me nicely :/ My computer crashed 3 weeks ago and well it's been hard for me to do anything but at least now it's getting fixed. Also during spring break my car broke down so this week has been hard for to get to lab on time during the morning so I haven't been in lab in the morning and well I have minimal hours this week. This week I started working on the submersible attaching the probe that will be reading data from the water. There is also a camera added to the submersible so that I'm able to see where I'm going and to just get an idea of how it is. (Like in Rio Salado or Papago park) 

I also tried testing out the probe that will be attached to the robot but it didn't seem to work out so well mainly because it is old and not calibrated. My next step is to calibrate the probe and test it to see if it is going to allow me to get accurate results. Since the only outside body of water on campus is a fountain I spent a good 30 minutes or so trying to get results but since it wasn't calibrated the results were a bit weird. Everyone kept looking at me like I was weird because I was putting stuff in the fountain but I guess they were just curious heck even public safety paid me a little visit.

Thursday was very interesting because as you all know it's when we have a robotics meeting and well we have a project to try out, 2 projects actually. One of those is build a soda bottle water rocket which is somewhat simple if you don't over think it. The other is making a small boat out of cardboard that should be able to float and move.

Finally

After a long and stressful week I feel somewhat accomplished. On Saturday my team and I participated in the vex robotics competition, going in we set a low goal of only scoring 5 points and yet we went above and beyond scoring an average of 40 points per game. We made it to the finals against Scottsdale since we beat ASU's engineering team and also Embry riddle school of aerospace engineering. Over all we did great, got second place and we were only beat by 2 points.

On Monday I went back to ASU again to present my poster project. It was a long day but the good thing was that we only had to present for a short amount of time. Everyone that went did a great job and most people presented to 2 or more judges, I only presented to one but he asked so many questions, most unrelated to my project. All in all I'm glad I got it over with because I don't think I would be able to do it for very long. In the end it all worked out pretty nice, except when I found out my laptop broke which was horrible :(. Hopefully I get it replaced in the next couple of weeks so I can be able to do my work.

Now it's time to start a new project which I have somewhat started already. I will be working with submersibles to try and collect data from the bottom of a lake or pond. This next project is going to be an interesting one.

Busy week

This week has been a stressful week because of everything we had to complete for the ASU conference. The poster that was for the ASU conference was completed on time and it looks pretty good, well it looks pretty good to me at least. Also this week has been a crunch time for robotics since the week before the robot wasn't working properly after all the alterations it had, I spent a good amount of time trying to fix it and get ready for the competition this weekend on Saturday also at ASU. I feel good about the competition we have a functioning robot well we have 1 out of 2 functioning robots, and it looks like it's going to do well. I spent a lot of time helping individuals both in robotics, and lab. I helped a good amount of people that were still working on their poster as well as helping them upload them to dropbox since a lot of the interns hadn't used it before.

This week end, and next week are going to take up a lot of time. On Saturday the the vex robotics competition is going to take place at ASU, and after that I will be attending an open house on campus. On Monday the 4th I will be heading back to ASU to attend the student conference and present my poster on my project all day long. Then on Friday S-STEM will be going on a field trip to the botanical garden which is awesome because I have never had the opportunity of going, and now that I do I will not be missing out. :)

The long days have begun

These past couple of days I have arrived at school at 7am and well it's a bit exhausting especially since I end up leaving like around 5 pm. From 7am-10am or 11am I'm in the lab after that I have classes until 1pm and after that I was in the lab 'till 5pm which is a pretty vast amount of time but it has its up sides. I have a somewhat good amount of my poster finished which is a good thing because those are a pain in the butt to do, not because they're hard but extremely time consuming. Since I was the first one to start my poster and had it saved on dropbox Matt and Josh told all the interns to use mine as the template which is totally find but now everyone's poster looks somewhat to mine, since they're all related :). Tomorrow I will be searching for a new template so that there won't be a resemblance with everyone else's, lets just hope I find one otherwise it would just look funny with everyone having the same poster.

On Wednesday I spent working in robotics, fixing some of the errors that the robot had encountered, since many of people there find themselves disagreeing with one another which is fine because that is process, the only problem was that things weren't getting done. I basically took the whole top part of the robot apart and build a newer version of it which I tried to make as symmetrical as possible, while also trying not to cut any pieces so it could be easily repaired or adjusted. Today since the robotics people were meeting up I showed them what I had done, at first they seemed a bit upset that I took it a part, but they soon came to realize that it was needed, since I wasn't there today to help them they worked on it themselves and I must admit they're off on a good path. Now that we had some ideas exchanged I now know what they want to do with the robot, before everything was done in a manner were only certain people knew what to do so it was hard for others to work on the robot without someone being there.

Anyways it's interesting to see how people interact with each other. I can always help as well if they need me :)

Weird week

   This week has been pretty weird for me because of everything I have going on like my project and school work. Today I worked on the bacterial cultures I have incubated a while back and it held good results except for some unfortunate few that were contaminated but I was still able to get data from the remaining ones. Basically what I did was count every single CFU's (Colony Forming Units) present on each individual dish meaning every dot on the dish was counted. The control plates that I had were the most contaminated of all the majority of them were contaminated but for the ones that were not contaminated I counted the CFU's and took the average of all the controls which theoretically should all have the same samples.

 




I also tested out this experiment for a lab that was meant to test out the levels of oxygen ppm, Nitrogen, and phosphate. At first the experiment seemed somewhat difficult but after I got started it was fairly easy. I was also timing myself to see how long it should take for someone to do it and it took me roughly 55 minutes but I also had multiple water sources to test out: tap water, DI water, and Papago water. It held some interesting results, At first I thought I had messed up somewhere but then I realized that everything was done properly so the results of oxygen was 0 ppm for all water sources, nitrogen was also at zero, the only one that gave me results was phosphate which Papago water was rated at 2 and both DI water and tap water were rated at 1.   

The Difficult Part

So now comes the hard part after 2 weeks it's time to get samples from my test tubes and try to identify the different species of algae. Based on observation alone it seems that the treatments with Sodium Phosphate added to it has the most growth and the weird thing is that tube #1 has the most growth which is expected but tube #2,3 had growth around the same as the control and tube #4 has the second highest amount of growth. Tube #1 had 1ml of a certain nutrient + 100μl of Sodium Phosphate and tube #4 had 25μl + 100μl of sodium phosphate. The nutrient Sodium Phosphate was added to the second set 100μl in each of the test tubes except for the control which is just plain Papago water which should have some nutrients in it. below are the tubes numbered 1-6 left to right.

When taking samples and putting it under the microscope I found that it was extremely difficult to identify all of the species so what I did was take picture with one of the microscope cameras which is somewhat better because I'm able to come back to the picture and see if my observations are the same as Matts. I did however see a pattern within the different sets mainly the one where tubes #1 and 4 had the most growth even though I expected #1 to have the most growth. Below are some of the many picture I took.