26 Jul Vito Zampini, Week 3 at UCSB Materials testing lab.

Hello everyone!

My week has been quite long but still awesome. It started with going to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo with my girlfriend and her mom who came to visit! Cal Poly was really cool and the bookstore is amazing and we all know that a bookstore sells the college alongside acedemics I guess?? We had an amazing day and went to pismo beach after looking around campus for a while to enjoy the sun a little too much. (got a little red and sandy 🙂

Oh also last week I forgot to mention my bike got stolen, wonderfull expierience that is. Filed a police report and now store the loaner bike my host family borrowed me in the lab right next to me!

Little recap: Over the last weeks I have been working on a frame that holds a moving boom arm which will have cameras, a laser and lights. The reason it holds a moving boom arm is so a robot that loads pieces into the testing area will not collide with the cameras and laser while they are over the testing area because the cameras and lasers will be in a positon not in the way of the robot. This frame that holds the camera, laser and lights will from now on be called the camera stage. (even though it doesnt just have a camera on it :o)

Tuesday I came into the lab and a C02 laser was waiting for me to build it. The Co2 laser is used to engrave glass but Matt my mentor wants to eventually put it on the camera stage. The laser was fairly easy to assemble but the rest I cannot say the same. First I had to somehow get software that will run this laser and luckily it came with some not helpful instructions, but there is always CLAUDE! Thank the engineering gods that this masterful AI engine was created because if not I would be only talking about setting up the software for the rest of the blog. (which I kinda am anyway) After me and Claude decoded the software and got it downloaded it was time to go biking to my house. (the picture is of the laser on the right ish)

Wednesday I wanted to suprise my mentor (because he wasn’t in) by engraving “Morning Matt” on a metal business card that came with the laser and putting it on his desk so he would see it in the morning but I didn’t finish the enclosure because we didn’t have enough material to 🙁 So I just helped Nate out (You can see Nate on the right of one of the pictures below) put up these big end panels to enclose his enclosure for a really hot laser. It also needs to be enclosed because there is strong blue lights that hurt the old eyeballs but they help Vilma a swedish intern get really good images of the fragments after enduring tests. Left-most image is my soon to be rethought of design of the laser enclose, middle image is of the front end piece and right-most image is of the back end piece.

Thursday and Friday I used so much of my thinking skills to try and nail down this design for the enclosure, and Matt really gave me a great look into my future prospects of engineering and how my first four years will drill me with stuff like desgining this enclosure which seems insignifacant but really isn’t. I think I went through like 4 redraws of this design and then on the last one I started thinking of how I could mount this to an actual optical table twas a little bit of a headache because I didnt think that the 80-20 piece would be a half inch from where I originally measured so then I just re-did a couple measurments and then finally sent a cut list to Matt so that he could order everything needed. Picture shows how I plan to mount the box to the table and I was measuring from the start of the 8020 (closest to the black piece) but I should’ve meassured from the end.

I trully think this week was one of my harder weeks and really kinda whirled me around like a wave 😉 but I also think its the week I learned the most from it was frustrating and challenging yet I knew it needed to be done and done right so that it wouldn’t cost Matt extra time and money if it wasnt.

See you guys next week.