02 Aug Vito Zampini, Materials testing lab UCSB, week 4

Hello everyone, this week was my favorite week so far!!

Monday was very fun but a little laid back. Matt and I went over the dimensions for the laser enclosure one last time, and I think he sent them off to get built. Then he showed me something truly amazing, Claude created a desgin for the entire stage that will be in the laser enclosure, front to back in insane detail and created files where you could view all of it. Every single part that needs to be machined or printed had its own file and could be printed right there and then, so thats what we did. All of the pieces will help us mock up and test Claude’s remarkable job. Then I finished the day off by finalizing the design of the thermal camera holder. (I don’t have pictures of what Claude created, mostly because it could be easily recreated if I had pictures and that is something Matt might not want. (don’t know why the pic is on its side 🙁

Tuesday was pretty cool because I got to see me own design (camera stage) (refer to last blog) on the optical table! First we had to rotate everything on it 90 degrees so I spent the morning undoing all the bolts and then left all the electrical stuff (that I did not know what to do with) to Matt. Before my desgin went on the optical table I had to put new legs on it that went from being 18 inches to being 30 inches. reason being the absolute unit of the laser that will eventually go on it but for now the medium scary laser stays in the corner. After I came back from lunch all the electrical stuff was disconnected and we put the new camera stage on which ended up being pretty heavy but it looked so good and was aligned to perfection, merci à moi. Then I went golfing as a single and ended up meeting 3 people my age and was a very fun and very bad round of golf.

Wednesday was superrr satisfying! Reason being I spent a little bit cable organizing the top of Nates enclosure (remember nate the jacked phd student with a 2000 degree celsius) desperately needed that cable organizing and me and Nate did a amazing job and was extremely satisfyinggg.

Thursday was MY BIRTHDAY!! So I came in 15 minutes late, oopsie. Super fun day mostly because it was my birthday and nothing was taking me off my birthday high but aside from being my birthday. Did I mention it was my birthday? ha. Matt taught me how to wire the motors and sodder. Wiring motors is very long proccess but mostly because I was being a perfectionist. Basically you get a ton of wires and cut them and put crimps on the end and feed them into a bus (little green box that acts as a mini electrical box, and is connected to the motor) and then the other end goes to power and computer/software. Then all the loose wires get shrink wrap and instead of leaving them without braiding them I braided them and they look really good, but my forearms hurt. Caution! if you are reading these blogs and taking advice or following my highschool brains ideas make sure the cables dont have magnetic fields that will interfere with other cables magnetic fields if you decide to braid them together, luckily I did not have to unbraid cables or else I would be rambling on about how unfortunate my birthday was! Soddering was the new skill that was quite difficult but I found a peace in it.

Later that day I took a big nap and cooked chicken milanesas with my host family and then they suprised me with a Argentine cake called Chocotorta! which turned out really good and was the cherry on top to my birthday!

Friday I decided to take the day to have a nice relaxing weekend and that weekend involved waking up at 5:30 am on friday to catch some really fun waves, involved a little bit of golf with adam (host brothery) then ended today on sunday a couple hours ago with some really fun surfing too!