Another Busy Saturday for SODA's InvenTeam

This past week, most of the members of SODA's InvenTeam were busy as ever.  With the kick-off of the 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) last Saturday, most of the team members spent some of their time helping the FRC team design their robot.  Three exceptions to this were Albert, Seth, and Zack.  These three InvenTeam members spent most of the week in Albuquerque rehearsing for the All State Guitar Ensemble.

8:00 AM - Albert, Seth, and Zack were at the University of New Mexico to start warming up for their morning concert performance.    

9:00 AM - Chloe and Denton go to watch their teammates at the guitar concert.

10:00 AM - Danielle arrives at SODA to work on her Supercomputing Challenge project for a few hours before going to work at her part-time job at the local movie theater.

10:30 AM to 1:00 PM - a few FRC team members arrive and start working on the team's robot.

1:30 PM - Albert, Zack, Chloe, and Denton arrive to start working on InvenTeam, Supercomputing Challenge, and FRC projects.

5:30 PM - Danielle returns from work and start helping with InvenTeam.

7:00 PM - After having great success on several projects, the students (InvenTeam and others) decide to call it a night.

Zack and Albert working on the program for the InvenTeam's Police ALERT project.  In the foreground is FRC robot they had just finished installing software updates on.

Chloe and Danielle making "mirror" prototypes for the Police ALERT.

Success!!! Albert pointing to the area where Chloe's movement is being detected.

The box in the top-right corner showing where motion was detected.

Camera connected to Raspberry Pi looking up at 360 degree conical mirror.

Two different "mirror" designs.

This week with SODA's InvenTeam

Talysa mentoring InvenTeam member Maria with her science fair project.

Danielle, Clara, and Victoria working on designs for FIRST Robotics.

Seth with scale model of FRC robot design.

Dion working on robot designs for FRC.

Dion's design ideas during brain storming session for FRC.

First time in weeks all the InvenTeam students were at SODA at the same time.

Victoria and Noah cannibalizing last year's FRC Robot.

Parent Meeting

Last night's parent meeting went very well. We caught all parents up to date on our latest progress of the Police ALERT system, along with reviewing the key messages of Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams. We also discussed budget and fundraising for the trip to Cambridge. We are lucky to have such wonderful parents who support our team greatly!

Belen Police Officer Visits InvenTeam

Officer Lopez meeting some InvenTeam members.

Officer Lopez discussing places to mount the Police ALERT indicator unit.

Power Requirements

Quelab

I needed advice on how to figure out the power requirements for the Police A.L.E.R.T, so when we went to Quelab I asked for help and advice. At Quelab I talked to Ray, and he told me that I needed to do several calculations to figure out the wattage, amperage, and amp hours required for the system to work. He helped me with the calculations, but since we didn't have all the information we needed he came up with some common numbers to help give me an idea of what the requirements would be. We didn't get through everything, and on another trip he said he would help me with the LED indicator.

After Quelab

After the trip to Quelab, I found the missing information and used that to figure out the power requirements for the Raspberry Pi, XBee WiFi, and the Camera were. I figured out how many Amps that whole system would need. I also started figuring  out the power requirements for the Inside indicator.

Police ALERT Logo

After several revisions our logo is finally completed!
To view out progress click on the link below!

http://soda-inventeam.phanfare.com/6375287

Chrome and Nickel plating

I have been looking up chrome plating vs. nickel plating. I was looking at the pros and cons of both and found that chrome plating is cheaper than nickel plating but nickel plating is sometimes stronger then chrome. Nickel-tungsten alloy is about ten times more durable and more environmentally friendly than chrome (here is an article on nickel-tungsten alloy http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/metal-0519.html). Both of them are very reflective and are almost impossible to tell apart both of them would give us what we need and the price difference is not very large. The problem is that besides nickel-tungsten alloy plating chrome is usually more durable than nickel plating and another problem is that I can't find a place that does that kind of nickel plating most do electroless nickel plating and it is not nearly as strong as chrome plating. I would use nickel-tungsten alloy plating but if we can't find anywhere that does that type of plating than we would have to go with chrome plating.