Thanks to the Blizzard of 2010 our Quarter Presentations were reduced to a 15min walk-around by the faculty on the Friday of 1/4s week. We quickly reworked our original presentation and slides to work with the new format (gutting it out for the most part). We had to repeatedly present the same thing to every small group of faculty that came in the door. Vastly different than the normal 1/4 presentation routine… We started off a bit rough but got into a rhythm quite quickly. BTW, Tom created an awesome looking theme for the slides and we’re hoping to integrate that over to the website soon.
The Quarter Presentation/Walkaround went rather smoothly, with very minimal questions from the faculty. Either we explained ourselves extremely well or we totally lost them 🙂 . Brenda did make a good point that we were being pretty technical but weren’t expressing the “why” [it would make her interested in it]. I remember Jim Burke from Lockheed Martin telling us in Bat-teK to always ask and answer the “why” question at every step of the way… ok so I’m a slow learner. We’ll need to expand on the “why” of our product for next time. During the presentation we showed Mike’s “Fiber One” camera intervalometer (it keeps your camera interval regular :P), the Bioloid robot and did a quick demo (python script to pan the camera taking pictures and compile it into a quick movie), showed them a potential GUI layout and showed them some test videos we’d made both with the Bioloid as well as the timelapse video Mike and Mark made of their trip to Canada.
So now that the Quarter Presentations are over we’ve got to take all the things we’d learned in our Research phase and start designing and implementing our robot. We’ll be making heavy use of the people we’ve met so far outside of this project. In fact, Prof. Messner (from the CMU Mechanical Engineering department) was kind enough to allow us to pitch our project to his under gradclass to recruit an intern for our project. More on this later. We’re starting to talk to actual suppliers and builders also to see what resources we have available and what we’d need to buy etc.
Now the fun begins…