12 Jul Starting week in UCSB!

Hello everyone! I arrived in santa barbara last weekend with my dad after a 14 hour drive! We got to my host families house and after a very short introduction and unpacking, my dad and I Touristed around and then later on I got the full local tour thanks to my host sister Aliyah and her friends. I visisted six beaches in the last week: Miramar, East and West beach, Depression beach, campus point, and Hascals beach. I really liked Miramar beach and Depression beach, the other beaches were just pretty normal but Miramar was very pretty and had a floating dock you could swim to and jump into the ocean! Depression beach is I think the better side of Campus point and its right next to the campus so its fun to go after or before work.

This picture is from East beach (picture above)

My host dad Cotter has a buddy that owns a Argentinian empanada called Buena Onda (picture above), and I arrived perfectly to see my home country advance all the way to the semi finals! Viva La Scaloneta!!

Monday was my first day at UCSB (Universtiy of California Santa Babara) and at 8:30 I got to meet my mentor Matt. Matt introduced me to the lab and the general consensus was that I should not take pictures of the actual machines I am working on but that anything that doesn’t show the actual optical table I should be perfectly fine uploading here! The goal that this lab is getting at is being able to autonomize the testing of materials and speed up the time it would take if a human were analyizing the fragments of the materials after hundreds of tests were done on those types of materials. The lab is currently testing a aluminum based metal and the way it does that is pulling it apart slowly and a camera records the entire procces while an AI carries out real time analysis. The AI that Matt coded is truly phenomenal because it cuts the time it takes to record and procces these materials down by insane amounts. The optical table carries a robot, and two linear actuators, one of the linear actuators is doing the really heavy work which is pulling apart the aluminum and the other pushes a camera to the position right above where the aluminum gets pulled apart and pulls it back to its home postion. The robot loads the aluminum pieces into the linear actuator that pulls them apart. The entire procces is really cool to see and Matt sits like a mad scientists wacthing all these graphs on the screen do their thing.

Through out the week I challenged myself with trying to complete certain tasks that need to get done for the lab. Some I could do some I could not and it was fun doing all those things by myself.

My highlights of the week were definetly fixing the labs 3d printer which was reading all types of errors but ending up just being this small piece of PLA stuck in the feeder, look on the left side of the picture and on that gear you can see a squished piece of grey plastic. (picture below on the left) My other highlight was designing my own piece on solidworks (a 3d engineering desgin software) the piece I designed was to help improve the cable management of the optical table because it is full of wiring, and it was to help me get used to solid works and get a nice idea of the software. The piece screws into a 80-20 aluminum nut, (the black piece) this will then allow the cables to get routed through the frame of the table since the legs and horizontal supports of the table are 80-20. I will let you all know more next week if the wiring of table gets more or less organized through these pieces I designed 🙂

See you next week!