Haircuts made easy

The term cruft at MIT can either refer in the present day to old technology left behind to be later reused for future projects or for old alumni.

The past tense verb "crufted" means to gather old tech and reuse it in a new way or to graduate and come back to see old classmates at MIT.

I crufted this WAHL clipper set so I can cut my own hair, other people's hair, or other people can cut my hair.

It seemed to work out well as I had a good friend remove my ducktail bits of hair on my neck last night with fine precision.

The Alpine Zone

 They call it the alpine zone "on top of the mountain area" because it is cold. They also call it that because the trees and wildlife there is very sensitive. One needs to be very careful not to harm the flora at high elevations.

On sunday, I climbed the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Particularly, Little Haystack, Mt. Lincoln, and Mt. Lafayette . We started at 2am in the morning. Headlamps guided our way past a waterfall in the middle of the night. It was quite the experience and unfortunately we didn't see the sunrise but it was otherwise a really great experience.

 I handled the winds by insulating myself in a trash bag. Probably could have spent $10,000 buying real hiking gear from some fancy store. But I'm young and still have my strength.

Group Pic

Rock Band at Stata

Unfortunately, I have not received the video from the event today I played at with my band. We had a great reception at the MIT Stata amphitheater at an event initiated by Daniela Rus. I have a UROP in their lab so it was fun to show off my musical talent and those of my close friends Hector and Hadrian as well. We played a four song set: The Bus Song, Fluorescent Adolescent, Freaking out the Neighborhood, and Looking like a Loser. We also played a bit of Can't Stop from RHCP and eventually played our song Waste. 

The Savitzky Golay Filter

 I recently started getting into a numerical method in an attempt to smooth out data from linear response detectors in an instrumentation experiment.

I think the Savitzky-Golay is a great analytical method for this sort of digital data form. Wiki link. From wiki " the purpose of smoothing the data, that is, to increase the signal-to-noise ratio without greatly distorting the signal. This is achieved, in a process known as convolution, by fitting successive sub-sets of adjacent data points with a low-degree polynomial by the method of linear least squares. " Which is good for the reactor data because we know how the curve should react along constant reactor power.

 Another method for smoothing is simply a moving average. (S.G. uses a method of triangular moving average to some degree by the way) There are various forms of moving average, but the idea is to take a window of points in your dataset, compute an average of the points, then shift the window over by one point and repeat.

Color Kinetics LED Panel

Recently I realized the summer is almost over. The prefrosh are coming into campus soon. I need to prepare cool things to show them. They won't be impressed by MOSFET oscillators or BLDC motors... They need sounds, lights, and color. So I am resolved to solve the problem of the currently not working LED panels on hall. A previous resident set up a bunch of Color Kinetics  boards in a waterproof, wooden box. http://www.colorkinetics.com/ is currently owned by Phillips, the electronics giant.

My current state with the project is sending noise over LAN cable to the LED controller. The board is 13 sections by 5 sections. At max capacity it draws a few kilowatts.

More info to likely come in the form of a project report. Bringing these LED's back from the dead will likely take more than a day.

Old Lambda Teardown

I think the best thing that happened today was my holstered multimeter. This development has helped me 
 make new friends around the lab and push into new layers of nerd-ness. I got around to cleaning my workspace around the DR lab's electrical rack equipment. I found some pretty nice power supplies that had the same blown diode problem I learned about the other day when I switched polarity on a BK-Precision PS. 

This is an old lambda brand power supply. Lambda is fairly well known around MIT for making nice power supplies but this one is definitely dated.

Melting Down Aluminum

I recently started up my metals forge again. The purpose was to make a few more aluminum ingots from scrap pieces from PSFC. I unfortunately video taped a cool video of aluminum squelching vertically.
The aluminum ingots will be melted down again in a few weeks and hammered out into a few neat tools hopefully. :)