Week 3 Day 2

Today is a down and dirty work day to get our table top model assembled. We started off by rounding up Jennifer (so she could pay) and heading to Lowe's to grab some stuff. The shopping expedition was tedious but necessary.

After we checked out we made some excellent choices on how to transport everything back to the lab.

Back in the lab we got everything laid out and set up my Dremel to start charging so we could cut the down spout to size for our riffles.

Everything was going pretty smoothly... until my Dremel refused to charge. Luckily Lori lives about 5 minutes away and she has one as well. Sadly, when she brought hers up the collar wouldn't release the burr bit so that was no good. We have my battery sitting in the charge with our fingers crossed, Lori is taking hers home to see if there is any tool in her house that can make the collar say uncle and we have Jennifer bringing up her Dremel for tomorrow to see if that works. At this point I'm seriously considering finding out if Makita or Dewalt makes something similar since Dremel has been such an epic fail.

With the absolute failure of our tools we switched gears and set up to start taking reading from our aquarium. The good news is the sensor cluster node has plenty of range to broadcast from the workshop lab to the computer lab. The down side is that the data is way off. We calibrated the spark probes and also took some low tech reading with test strips to get a base line for comparison. The dissolved oxygen probe worked great right off and so did the temperature probe. The pH probe was just plain wrong. The test strip indicated it was between 7.5 and 8. The spark, once it was calibrated, was reading about 8.3. That Atlas probe in our sensor cluster insists that the pH is 5.9. Seems unlikely... We have tried calibrating it several times to get it more in line with the other readings but it is being stubborn. Yixin is focused on that problem and is working towards a solution.

For any one who is curious, our minnows are doing great. They seem perfectly happy and really dig the probes.

This afternoon we are going to a seminar that focuses on ways to take what we are learning here and translating it to a useful format in our classrooms. Yay Lesson Plan Development with Dr. Thompson!