Update: Teensy, VEX, Misc

Sup!
Here is a brief update of our progress in VEX, as well as an exploration of the Teensy 3.0, as well as a project that I finished a few weeks back!


So basically in VEX, the overall drive train is complete now. The only thing missing is the pneumatic locks for the differential system:

Furthermore, our lift is also essentially completed, with our design being based on a 6-bar parallelogram lift.

Overall, making some good progress on VEX, still have a solid 2 weeks left before the competition at our school!

Now onto Teensy 3.0, I got mine last week and never had a chance to play with it until today. So far, it has blown my mind! It has an ARM Cortex M4 processor, more IO than the Uno, complete support with the Arduino IDE, many libraries made for the Uno works; (lcd crystal library demonstrated):

Dont take note of the mess on my table ;)

I have also played with the touchRead() functions of this board. Basically, this chip has hardware to measure the capacitance of the pins. So by using the touchRead() function, you can create a bunch of touch sensitive buttons! Although you will have to calibrate the pins, as each material has a different offset in capacitance. Furthermore, it seems like I'm a lot more capacitive than my friends! Since I can constantly trigger it with little force.

So far, I'm very impressed with this chip, I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in electronics.

Random Project: 

Background information, at my school (Taipei American School), all students in middle school and upper school has laptops, the lenovo thinkpads. The thing about these laptops are that they are quite bland and plain compared to alternatives. So in an attempt to personalize my laptop, I decided to laser cut, dremel, my laptop. What was hilarious was that while I was doing this, the head of the IT department walked in on me, saw me, shook his head, and left. Here is a picture of the final work:

Gooo android (Lenovo Thinkpad T400)

As you can see from the picture, it looks quite nice, and yes, the logo is lights up from the backlight of the LCD panel, much like the apple logo on computers!

Here is the rough outline of the steps I took to accomplish this:

1. Create vector file of the the logo I want

2. Take apart laptop

3. Unscrew the LCD panel and plastic lid from magnesium alloy frame. 

4. Laser cut the plastic lid with the logo I created

5. Dremel cut out a rectangle from the magnesium allow frame (laser wont cut through that)

6. Laser cut out acrylic pieces

7. Glue the acrylic pieces into the wholes

8. Reassemble

9. Profit!