What I Did Over Christmas Break

What did I do? I wasted my time!! Ok, maybe not, but I sure had a lot of other plans for this three week break with no work or school.

So here is the progression of my ginger bread model construction.

First I designed all the electrical stuff, here is a schematic of what I built.



Then I took Zach's ball and used it as a paper mashe frame.



Then once the ball had hardened, I drained the air out of the ball(yes Zach's ball made it out safely), cut the paper in half and wired in all of the lights.









Once that was done, I duct taped the two halves back together and began making gingerbread. In efforts match as closely as possible the pentakis dodecahedron pattern that spaceship earth is...



we decided to make three isosceles triangles that when put together would make the equilateral triangle. So after some fun math and trig, I figured out how to cut a block of ginger bread in order to get the maximum number of triangles without wasting any space.



After cooking the gingerbread, and letting it harden. I needed to combine the three isosceles triangles together, this was a bit challenging because they also needed to be slightly pyramidal in shape, so we used some play dough molds to hold them in this shape while we hot glued them together.



Once I had made a bunch of these, I began attaching them to the ball, (I also made some legs during the cooking process. It was important to have six legs, in pairs, because the real one is supported by six pylons driven 120 feet into the ground.)






Then, once the triangles were on, and the ball was covered, with some fudging. I began to fill in the cracks with frosting



By this time, it was New Years Eve and we ran out of eggs, so we couldn't finish the frosting portion. So on New Years, we took it to the family party and finished it up there. There, Em built Mickey's hand and wand.

Here is the final product, yes the lights do not exist on the real thing, but I had to make it nerdy somehow :-)



Here are some videos of some of the different blinking light combinations that I programed onto it, and yes, it's still programmable, there is a jack in one of the legs that I can connect my computer to access the micro controller that does all of the light blinking. :-)

Someone Got His Train

In case you haven't noticed by the hijacking of my blog :) Peter does indeed love trains. So when he asked for a really big train for Christmas it came as no surprise. Actually he has asked for this train ever since we've been married. We just finally found one for a decent price. Merry Christmas sweetheart...I really do love you. :)

Yes I Still Love Trains!

We got approval from the board of trustees to have a wonderful train layout this year. Here are some videos of our layout.

Thanks mom for letting us have the train out this year!

For the nerds: When you look at the track layout, you'll notice that there is an electrical issue presented with this loop-back setup. The polarity of the rails is shorted when the track is looped back on itself. So to overcome that problem I had to do two things, first I had to eclectically isolate each loop from the single track behind the couch and each time the train is about to re-enter the strait section behind the couch, I set it up to trigger a magnetic switch which flips the polarity of strait section of track, that way there aren't any shorts in the track. Figuring out how to do that was lots of fun!