The assignment for week one was to explore a variety of the modeling systems available to us as students, and to begin the process of hashing out a final project. Starting with the resources, I had prior experience with SoldiWorks and Mastercam. Knew generally what photoshop was supposed to do, but was naive to most everything else. Antimony in particular caught my interest, but presented an interesting difficulty in that it seemed to dislike Windows operating systems. I installed Ubuntu in a virtual box on my computuer. I reinstalled Ubuntu in a virtual box on my computuer after I realized I hadn't given it enough hard drive space. This began the first of many learning experineces as I tried to navigate how to navigate with terminal. In the process, I learned how to use git on a rudimentary level to edit the class webpage, I learned VIM as a text editor, which I am using to compose this post, and I learned that SUDO can solve many of my problems, and appears to know more about what I should be doing to run Ubuntu than I do. Sadly, I never ended up getting around to Antimony, which is why my innitial sketch for my project (below) was done in solidworks. I'm rather interested in manufacturing, so I'd like my final project to explore the fabrication of a component. Inspired by a "How It's Made" episode on gummy worms, I decided that wax casting in corn starch might be a very interesting way to do a cyclic manufacturing system. The plan, as best as I can describe it, is to press the desired master shape into the corn starch, pour wax into this "mould", let the wax cool, extract the part and remelt it, smooth the corn starch, and repeat. I'd love to do this as a moving assembly line, but that might be beyond the scope of the time I have available to me, in which case it will be more of a single-station-with-robot-arm-and-actuators setup. In theory... More to come, and CAD when things settle down more firmly! Maybe even some web design...