With 24th of July came the most annoying end to the holidays:
Explanation: notification comes out on Canvas at 7.30am telling the students with MECHENG 270 labs at 8 and 9am that the labs are cancelled this week. Thumbs up, lecturers!
Now I can’t really call this year’s inter-semester break a holiday – Warman project, yay – but everyone else has either gone out of Auckland, played games in their bedroom all holidays, or were working their asses off getting those juicy work experience hours done. Really concerned by that last one… But hey, dedicating my hard-earned holidays to building our Warman project wasn’t all too bad.
I never explained what the Warman project was about in full before, so I’ll do that now. The Warman project is based on a real-life robotics competition where you have to build a machine that can collect six balls (two golf, two racquetball and two squash balls), sort them into two groups (“golf balls” and “not golf balls”) and deliver each group of balls to their respective bin on the other side of an L-shaped track like below:
In the two weeks before semester two started, I pretty much lived in both the Engineering manufacturing workshop and the computer labs, meeting up with my teammates to get as much crap done as possible. Making and putting together the mechanical stuffs, buying all the electrical jazz and programming the robot took a lot of effort, time and money (*cough cough* pay-to-win), and we didn’t get nearly as much done as we would’ve liked, but just coming to uni to meet up with the team and grind through hours of sawing, laser cutting, sanding, testing, adjusting and Creo was surprisingly fun.
Now I don’t know much about second semester’s courses apart from the info I got from the third years and last year’s course reviews:
- MECHENG 211: a bit like that part of ENGGEN 140 about membranes and mass flow but applied to mechanical systems; rumoured to be the hardest course in Part II Mechanical/Mechatronics.
- MECHENG 222: ENGGEN 121 dynamics section continued…
- MECHENG 270: the software programming paper that distinguishes us from the Mechanical cohort in second semester; last year’s reviews for this course were real harsh.
- ENGGEN 204: MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, report writing and oral presentations with free A’s for everyone!
If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll remember that I didn’t do ENGSCI 211 with the rest of my cohort last semester. Instead, I get to do ENGSCI 311 this semester alongside my other second year courses. Bit of a sneak peek on that: four lectures a week, no tutorials, no labs, three assignments, one test, one exam and one hellish second half…
More info on the courses to come when I’ve actually managed to make it through the first half of this semester! Thanks for reading guys, and hope you had some great holidays and are bracing yourselves for the new semester!