Thanksgiving break

The semester is coming to an end. It's Thanksgiving break and I'm at home with my family. Still plenty of homework to keep me busy, though. I'm expecting finals to be a bit stressful, but once we're done, Christmas break is going to be the best ever! I actually won't have anything to do!!! Wooo!!! That is the great thing about college, we work hard and we get it done, no need to spread stuff out when you can work a little harder and get things done. That's a great strategy to have, maybe I need to think a bit about how I operate and see if that's the best way. I tend to be the person who works hard at EVERYTHING, so I keep busy. I am the type that spreads stuff out, too. Is that a good thing? Well I don't get quite as overloaded I suppose. But on the other hand, when it is Thanksgiving break, I want to have a break. Instead, I have to do homework stuff like this every day. Hmm.. Study skills are very important, and efficiency. I can always improve on that.

In class, our next project will be due soon. My group is building a hovercraft that we plan to program to steer. I hope that we are able to program it well, because that seems to be the hardest part. We are basically done with the actual hovercraft already. I have some experience with hovercrafts already, because for AP Physics last year in high school, my "project" was to make a hovercraft. I actually was pretty successful because I was able to make it remote control to steer it and control the major duct (hovercraft for fan). I was messing with multiple motors and a servo just like what we are doing now! It was an individual project and I really enjoyed it. But my major problem was controlling all three parts, the two ducts and the servo, with the same battery/remote control. Maybe they weren't getting enough voltage. Actually one of the problems now that I am remembering was that the servo which controlled the rudder would automatically turn to one side whenever I turned it on. That was a bit frustrating...

Here are some pictures of that:

One interesting thing for our project is that we are trying a COMPLETELY different skirt design than what I used, which you can see easily on the bottom left picture. My skirt on that hovercraft ran around the edge of the craft, while ours is like one big bag over the bottom. They both seem to work, but I think that I prefer my old one. It was good to try different designs, though.