reflection

may or may not be my last post. for those of you who've been following (even just a little bit), thanks for the support.

i've changed my mind. yesterday wasn't a failure. it was a hiccup, but not a failure. i decided to spend the summer with the aim of building a remote control battleship that shot water 20 to 30 feet. i did that yesterday. the fact that it wasn't perfect isn't important. so i misgauged a couple of things. thats why I'm not in the business of making battleships. i built a functional version of exactly what i set out to build. so i'm happy with that.

furthermore, i grew imensely over the course of the project. both in terms of my building skills and my persistence skills. I've always considered myself a 'never give up' sort of person, but I certainly would've given up on the project many different times had I tried building this thing any previous summer - or school year for that matter. I put in maybe 500 hours on this guy. at minimum wage even I wouldve raked it in! but I was working for something else. or, someone else. while this project started about building a fun toy to play with, (particularly cause i had been so starved of building things while at school) the moment daniel went to work, the moment where it was all me and no one else to blame, the project turned into a prove myself project. prove myself to myself i suppose. ya i've done really cool stuff in the past, but i had help to some degree on those. this one, i wanted the project to be so me dominated that you couldn't possibly say, oh, he only could do that because his dad helped him, or oh, he didn't really contribute that much to the final product. and certainly no one was saying any of those things to me, about anything, but maybe i was saying that to myself. maybe because i didn't get a summer job and despite the fact everyone was saying this was a terrible summer to do that, i still felt that i shouldve been deserving. i don't really know, but prolly it was a mixture of all of the above. regardless, this battleship turned into a build that was for me to prove to me.

anyways, the things i learned on this build are numerous. i learned to solder, a lot in fact! i learned about low budget mockups prior to actual prototyping. i got burned 2 or three times by part flow - probably the number one lesson of the summer. nothing hurts more than going to work on a saturday morning only to find the part you need more than any other isn't there and ships from new jersey. i learned that part flow isn't just what do you need today to get under way, it is what do you need today, tomorrow, and in five days from now. you take care of that before you go out to build. i learned about motors and i got real non-physics-lab experience with the voltmeter - something that none of my prior projects gave me much of. i experienced and learned to recognize a blown fuse. i got uber frustrated with connectors and learned that often times in a big project one person's entire job is making sure all connectors are consistent. i experienced failure multiple times and got a bit better at rebounding. i learned about stress releif, but it took me a couple of tries. i got burned by center of gravity despite the fact that both others and myself had mentioned the issue many times. Instead of banking on being able to compensate, i should have run a physics model to check it out (I tried but gave up when i had trouble finding water related models. i should have tried harder). I certainly will run more models on more criteria on future projects. I learned that thats the sort of engineer i am - the do the math then the build type as opposed to the build it and figure out the issue then build it again. i learned how hard the last 10% is. I learned to stay consistent with my blog. I learned to love epoxy and hate lacquer. i decided to give up on too ambitious of plans and be realistic about both my talent and my resources. i practiced calling for help a lot. and i guess i learned to be proud of something even though i know its not as good as it could be. so i'm fighting my perfectionism. and in fact, thats something i learned, take it to the good enough not the perfection point. that was a hard lesson for me to grasp.

thats just a couple of the lessons i've learned from this project. and, i had a ton of fun along the way. it was a good summer project.