Lego Mindstorm Tug a War

This week in engineering we had a challenge to make a car out of Lego Mindstorm pieces to compete against other teams. My group was Daniel, Dylan (Baker), Dylan (Lektorich), and I. Our car ended up being able to beat Marshall's car, but could not defeat either Tommy's, or Allistair's, putting us around 3rd or 4th place in the classroom. Here are some pictures:

(Unfortunately our first iteration was taken apart so this is a replica)

+We had a driveshaft that spooled the string that helped to accelerate the game

-The spool sometimes worked against us

+The 3 wheels looked cool

-It was not heavy enough to really pull hard enough to beat many cars

+The big wheels had some good traction

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Ping Pong Ball Bridge

Today in engineering we had a design build challenge to build a way to get a ping pong ball across a two foot gap using a system of currency, with only 12 thousand dollars and 18 minutes. I was in a group with Marshall Alldredge and Caleb Woodson. Our idea was to build a bridge using two "stringers" of straws stuck into each other, propped up on one side by a cup. It worked really well on the first try, and was so cheap that we ended up decorating it with our leftover money.

Here are some pictures:

Superbowl Commercial

Superbowl Commercial

This Superbowl, even though the Broncos were being beat into the ground by the Seahawks, a ton of really funny commercials were aired. My favorite one of all of them would definitely be the Radioshack's 80's commercial, where they get a call from the 80's, and characters retake the store. 

To air a Superbowl commercial, it costs 4 million per thirty seconds, making this one cost around 8 million, not factoring in the cost of actors, equipment, song rights, and a studio.To break even on the cost of airing, they would have to sell around forty thousand phones at 200 dollars each, and probably around 45 thousand to pay for the complete costs.

This is the commercial that they aired.