Only a little bit of it, but new in the Guan Post-Academic Year Collection is this finely crafted piece of machinery.

It’s some sort of air-bearing spindle assembly, probably meant to spin obscenely fast. Two pneumatic bearings support a very smoothly polished stainless steel shaft, on the ends of which are perched what suspiciously appear to be former brushless motor parts. There is a 8-magnet assembly at the far end wrapped in Kevlar, next to a hub-like piece. On the close end is four very large rare-earth magnet assemblies, each with 8 magnets, and curiously, each is offset by a few degrees. I suspect this was a stepper of some sort. These are very powerful magnets.

I happen to have a small compressor that I might fire this thing up with, just to see it spin, I suppose.

Then I can build a motor around the magnets and….

???

Profit!

Round 1 of 4 complete.

Insert 168673 quarters to continue.

That’s alot of quarters. Today was my last final exam, and with that out of the way, the summer season begins.

Quite alot has happened in the past year, and I think this site suffices in documenting all of it. I can’t say that I’m particularly reflective about it at the moment. Alkali metals, running up stairwells for shits and giggles, weird bikes, random explosions, a helpful alarm clock every morning from the construction outside my window…

So what’s the plan for summer? Now that I’m IRL, it’s time to stop blowing off summers and actually do things. I’m going to continue my research & development position with the Media Lab, and hopefully by the end of summer we will have the Citycar prototype running. Other than that, building random things will continue as normal. Once I get the ESC replaced on Snuffles Reloaded, then I’ll continue my own R&D work on that. I’m seriously contemplating the creation of a conversion kit if the idea is viable. Other things might come as the sumemr rolls on. Whatever the case, I should be plenty busy.

The summer bot fleet will be Ãœberclocker and Pop Quiz 2, both for local events and Dragon Con 2008 & Robot Battles. Going to DC08 raised a bit of controversy within my circle of peers because the same week is freshman rush and orientation week, which is a big thing to get involved in here. But hey, maybe next time.

Bot-mode on.