Hi, my name is Vivian Trommer, and I am interning at Colorado School of Mines. I am working with Professor Petruska, two of his PhD students, and a master’s student this summer. We are working on making a self-driving, electric race car using an RC car (the Super Baja Rey 2.0). I am staying with my half sister, Shawnee, and her husband, Drew, in Lakewood, Denver.
This week was so much fun! I continued working on making a 3D model of a sensor mount for the car in SolidWorks. I finished the design for the first sensor mount, and I am very happy with it. The second sensor mount, however, was more difficult than the first because we had to put it in an area of the car that was more difficult to design a mount around. I spent the whole week focusing on the second mount. I was struggling with how I wanted the mount to attach to the car and spent a long time trying to figure out the best way. I ended up deciding to make a sort of clamp that could attach to the car, and additionally, it would secure to one of the plastic rods with a series of zipties.
I ended up 3D printing two models this week, but one time we printed, the filament ran out in the middle, so it took a lot longer than expected and created a few construction problems. I also got to drive the car around this week just to test it out. It was a lot of fun, and we got it to go pretty fast. The car can go up to 50mph, but I had it set at only 50% for the first drive, so I didn’t end up accidentally crashing it.
This is the walk through campus to the lab
Unfortunately, I got sick this week, so I had to leave the lab early on Tuesday and stay home on Wednesday. Thursday, I also stayed home because of Juneteenth, which is a national holiday, so the campus was closed. While I was at home, I finished two Liberty puzzles, and I’m still working on a third, and I started to read two new books. One is Mythology by Edith Hamilton, and the other is The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. My sister and her husband also took me out to Casa Bonita one night for dinner, which was so much fun, I loved it.
These were the two puzzles I did
Also, this week our basement flooded, so I spent a lot of time trying to fix that. My room is in the basement along with the living room and laundry room, but luckily, my room was not affected. We think it is a problem with the plumbing that the previous owners of the house did, but we won’t know for sure until the plumber comes on Monday. It was a pretty big hassle, but we handled it well, although the living room is in a big state of disarray. We estimated that it was between 90-110 gallons of water, and at one point, my sister was using a shovel to get the water out. At least the floors are really clean now!
These are all of our towels out to dry, along with the living room rug that was absolutely soaked
Overall, despite the basement flooding, it was a really good week, even though I wasn’t in the lab the whole time. I’m still learning more and more, and I can’t wait for next week!
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