Team One/Journal

Revision as of 17:52, 8 January 2013

Day 0 (1/7/2013)

It has been eight days since the Stuxnet outbreak. What we knew before the incident is that Stuxnet was a first-gen hardware virus aim at destroying parts of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. We've gathered through word of mouth that the virus has mutated and spread through majority of the world's nuclear infrastructure. Majority of the world sits in devastation from systematic meltdowns of nuclear power plants and freak self-detonations of ICBMs.

"Thankfully", MIT's reactor was only a small test reactor and only campus was destroyed.

Rodrigo, Dan, Nanu, and I (Tyler) were at Poor House at the time of the blast and hence survived. We've taken up refugee at Edward's apartment at the edge of the blast radius. However, food, water, and other amenities has become scarcer. There has been riots at the Shaws in Boston. As a result, we've looked north to the remains of campus for food. Rumor has it that Professor Donald Sadoway had a large stash of Twinkies on campus because of the 12/21/2012 scare. Though, now it looks more like the Mayans were right.

If the Twinkies exist, this would be huge. Everyone knows that Twinkies are the only food that can survive an apocalypse. We would not only be able to eat, we could trade it for further goods.

Day 1 (1/8/2013)

We had a meeting this morning. Campus is heavily covered in radiation and hence traveling back there would definitely result in long term harm. As a result, we've decided to build a robot to travel to campus for us.

Codenamed PEGbot, this robot is suppose to travel to campus, search it for Twinkies, and report back the location of the Twinkies.

In building PEGbot, the following was accomplished.

   Mechanical Design
   (1) Center Wheel Drive - allows PEGbot to turn with a zero turn radius
                          - a caster wheel was placed in the back center to provide a three point base
                          - the battery over the caster to back weigh it so it doesn't fall forward
   (2) Secondary Platform - provides PEGbot with a second level enabling it to carry a laptop
    ** see blueprints below

   Communication 
   (1) Library of functions and classes complied into the Arduino
   (2) Laptop sends commands to the serial port in the Arduino to control PEGbot
   (3) Can control PEG bot with Andriod phone.