Entries by Harpo
We are finished working for the night, and are heading to sleep, as we have been getting decidedly silly and unproductive. We will pick up with the touch bumpers in the morning.
We just had a power outage. We’re now back online, and are going to do some work on the independent studies we are doing this year. We will spend some time on physics before deploying the calculus and getting to work on the Lego. We may also take advantage of Daylight Savings Time ending tomorrow [...]
We will be meeting this weekend at Will’s house. I am taking the SATs tomorrow morning, and will head up in the evening, stay over, and return on Sunday evening. I think we may be able to finish the physical construction this weekend and begin programming. All that remains are the touch bumpers.
We did it! We created a functional rack-and-pinion steering system! It works! Hooray! And other such exclamations of joy and excitement. We got a huge amount of work done today, building a completely new steering system which finally works. It was somewhat funny, because we put it together kind of as an afterthought. We had [...]
We will be meeting next weekend for both days. I am taking the SAT Saturday morning, and we will meet at my house afterwards. First priority will probably be the steering system. We have still been unable to create a working rack-and-pinion system, and no other type of system has worked properly so far, even [...]
We finished work a few hours ago, as Will had to get home. We did manage to complete the crank system for the transmission. We thought this would be the last major piece of construction we did, but we were unfortunately wrong. We have again taken apart the steering system. This marks at least the [...]
Will and I are having an unexpected work session today. So far, we’ve created a new system for moving the transmission between first and second gears. It’s based on a crank rather than a rack and pinion as we had before. It could potentially provide more power and be much more compact. We are also [...]
We have finished work for the day. We redesigned the transmission to incorporate a lower gearing ratio. This should solve the problem we had earlier of second gear not being powerful enough. We also completed a newly redesigned track system for the transmission to slide on. We did not finish reincorporating the gear system that [...]
Due to health circumstances, I am forced to leave for a little while. However, Lyle has called (and hell has frozen over) to say that he’ll be joining us. I also spoke to Simon on Saturday, and he plans to come by as well. Will and I found it somewhat amusing that we have the [...]
Will has arrived, and we are beginning work.
Enough legal jargon! I want some engineering! We’re going to work again on Monday, at my house. First on the agenda will probably be redesigning the transmission to lower the gearing ratio, as I previously posted about. We’ll also be refining the steering and possibly buttressing the suspension if necessary. Further posts will follow during [...]
We’ve registered the domain name carofawesomeness.com, but the trademarking process has been proving more difficult and expensive than we had expected. We’re researching our options, however for the moment, the process is somewhat stalled.
Will has begun the process of registering “Car of Awesomeness” as a trademark. We have the option of attaching a domain name to the trademark, but unfortunately, LEGO(R)’s Fair Play policy prevents us from using their name in a URL, so we cannot, for instance, use legocarofawesomeness.com. We are in the process of deciding if [...]
We’re in the process of researching our options on the patenting and trademarking processes. We have yet to decide which component we want to patent. Will has a family friend who is a patent attorney who has thus far answered a few of our questions, and says he can give us some help as we [...]
We finished work at about 6:00 this evening. We have made significant progress on the car, completely redesigning the suspension and steering systems. We went through several different designs for the latter before coming up with the current one, which is, as we had hoped, suspended from the shock arms so as to move with [...]
We are awake, and are resuming work. The first order of business is the the steering system, which will float on the shock arms so it will move with the suspension. This has the added benefit of not adding the steering system’s weight to the car, allowing more play in the suspension for going over [...]
We have completed the MegaBlock sacrifice. To give you an idea of the awesomeness, we used the following tools during the procedure: MegaBlocks Cigarette lighter Handheld butane torch 30% nitromethane RC car fuel Oxyacetylene torch Which makes for an awesome sacrificial rite. We used the various torches to ignite the blocks and more thoroughly destroy [...]
We are commencing the MegaBlock sacrifice, aided by some nitromethane fuel. Photos to follow.
Will’s father located the missing spring, so we are continuing with work. We are adopting the original design with the smaller springs, as it appears that this will be sufficient for the car’s weight.
We have been working at Will’s house for the past three hours or so. We are in the middle of redesigning the suspension and steering systems, but we have run up against a serious problem. Somehow we managed to lose one of the four springs used in the actual shocks while rebuilding the shock arms. [...]
Finally, we have scheduled our next work session. We will be working Saturday evening and Sunday morning at Will’s house. One or both of us will be live blogging all the work we do, so expect more updates soon.
We are hoping to work on the car this weekend. The first priority at this point is finishing the steering system. Once this is complete, we will be able to begin the programming. We also have to address the issue of shifting; we need some kind of rotation sensor to determine when the car is [...]
We got a lot done this weekend, although substantially less than we were hoping to. We had hoped to finish the physical construction and the programming, but neither of these was accomplished. This was due mainly to our iPhone escapades (see Blog). However, we did a great deal of work on the steering and suspension [...]
Will and I are scheduled to work on the car this weekend, after we camp out for our iPhones. We’ll be at my house all weekend. Hopefully we’ll make some substantial progress on the car’s design and programming. I expect that Plog posts and photo galleries will be update several times on Saturday and Sunday.
It stands for Project Log. I’ve reorganized the blogs to make everything easier. This one’s just for the Lego Car of Awesomeness, so you tech fiends, subscribe away to the RSS feed, and don’t worry about the outside world interfering. This page shall contain pure and unadulterated engineering.