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Break is over, so here are the projects that I either made progress on or finished:

-Tiny Mammoth: My friends and I ordered the mammoths (see earlier post) and put them together at my house, and then used my dad’s acrylic from work to encase them. The first attempt did not go well at all. After assembly, he mixed the powder and liquid in a rubber mortar and poured it over the models. He then stuck them in a double boiler so it would react faster. The end result was a block so full of bubbles that it looked exactly like a crouton. So, we ordered more and tried it again, this time at his office. We used scalpels and surgical tweezers to pop the pieces out and then carefully assemble them. I even used a microscope which helped a lot. To encase them, we first laid down a base of powder, then set the mammoth on it, then covered him up in powder. We then squirted the liquid on top and let is seep down by gently squeezing the sides of the mortar. Last time we accidentally used yellow colored liquid, so this time we used clear. After the liquid seeped down, we put them in a pressure pot which applied heat and about 20 psi. Then we popped them out of the mortar and ground them to a square and polished them with pumice. The result was much much better than before. They all turned out really good. The only problem was that they all had a small amount of powder in the very middle of the acrylic that did not get any liquid. Luckily, it wasn’t much and we passed it off as a snow bank that the mammoth was walking through. If we try it again, or with another model, we plan on using an anesthetic needle filled with the liquid to inject to the middle of the powder. Hopefully that will eliminate all dry powder.

-Email alert owl: After much help and time spent on the Hak5 forums, I was unable to get this working 100%. When I tested the circuit I built, I could only get the owl’s eyes to blink and I couldn’t get the head to move. Since it was to be a gift, I didn’t want to give something that didn’t work 100% the way I wanted it to, so the person never saw it. The guy on the forums who was helping me said his worked no problem, but still seemed a little starved for power. I plan on tackling this again when I have taken more classes at Tech to understand how to design circuits to do that kind of thing. But the good news is that I learned a lot about how transistors work and how they can be used, and my friend liked the owl even without my mod.

-Rocket Launcher: I was able to draw up some schematics for my rocket launcher control box. I will be using a kitchen timer to count down and trip a relay that will fire the rocket. If you go to my projects link (in last post) you can look at the schematics. I didn’t have time to fabricate this, but I did get most of the parts. I still need to order the relay and another switch or two.

-Tiny laptop (Acer Aspire One): I did get this for Christmas, but unfortunately, it did not work. So I am now talking with the company I bought it from to try to sort stuff out and get a new one. My friend got his and it worked, so I helped him install Ubuntu 8.10 and install Wine and Skype and update everything. He has now been introduced to the wonderful world of Linux. On a side note, our Xbox 360 broke (error E74) so I also have to be looking for either a cheap new one or decide to pay $94 to get it fixed, or try to fix it myself)

-GBA emulated in a PSP emulated on VirtualBox: Turns out you can’t hack a PSP emulator. Doh!

Everything else didn’t happen either because I didn’t have enough time or money or both.