Burke Blog for Epics of India

This is the last blog post for the semester, so I am going to wrap up my thoughts on the course and everything in it.  First off, I thoroughly enjoyed the reading, I was skeptical when I first heard about this course fomr my other AME friends, but I took it anyway because its always nice have others you know in a class, plus you have built in friends for comments.  Another benefit was getting to learn their writing styles, it is not something we ever experience of each other in our classes.  It also helped me see more of their interests outside of class, we talk and share things, but the things that were significant to us to come out in our writing is what I noticed, and there were many things I had not seen.  The other added benefit was that this class gave us things to talk about while working on projects or capstone, because there is a lot of time spent on those things, so it is very easy to run out of talking points.  As for the rest of my semester, I st...

The last week before spring break was very stressful, because all of my exams were that week for my grad classes, making for a lot of stressed studying.  Optimization and Optimal Control was an especially hard exam to study for, due to the theoretical nature of the course, with very few examples, but luckily the exam was identical to the study guide, so the exam went very well, and is worth 40% of my grade, so now I am feeling better about the course as a whole.  The Control Theory exam also went fairly well, I do not have my grade back yet but I believe my performance was strong and the professor is a fairly easy grader so all should be fine.  The extra week in this class for spring break was perfect, because it allowed me to push back most of the assignments until this week to give me time to focus on studying.  It also allowed me to give the best performance in all my classes by giving the best performance on both the exams and on my writing in here.  The ext...

This week, not much happened for fun, everything was focused on classwork, particularly in my graduate studies.  My capstone class had to have the aircraft for each sub team built, so that was a massive undertaking, and then had to build a final, completed prototype as well as write up a almost completed draft of the report.  My main portion of this project was the report writing, because it was something that I could do while completing all of my master's research and research assistant work out at the Advanced Dynamics Laboratory.  For research, we hit a massive ramp up in workload, as now we are moving to both the flight computer programming and control law portion as well as the actual physical construction of the octorotor.  This has taken up almost all my time, as I spent almost all of my week in the lab when I was not in class, and all of the weekend, so it was rather uneventful on any other front.  The only thing outside of this work I really did was g...

This week, the work I was most proud of was my story writing for this class.  When I started this class, I did not expect to be able to bring such informal writing experience as I have with a Dungeons and Dragons to this class, so that definitely was a surprise.  It was a major step up, however, converting the sparse note keeping and plot branches I am used to writing into a singular, cohesive story.  Instead of having to prepare for the vagaries of other humans, the characters in the usual campaign story, I was able to make them do exactly what I wanted in the story, making everything much simpler to handle and write about.  Outside of this class, the other main event of the week was completing more of my masters research project.  My team and I were able to complete the design and construction of a prototype of an arm extension mechanism.  The purpose of this mechanism is to allow two arms of a drone to extend and rotate, allowing flight in the "horizon...