This week was machine week, where the assignment for the week was to be done by section. The EECS section's project was an automatic Nerf gun that combated Neil's biggest pet peeve: students walking into class late.
Link to group machine week documentation
My largest confirmation for machine week was coming up with our project's name: The Gershenforcer. In all seriousness, though, I did find myself in a unique position amongst the group in terms of responsibilities. I was largely unavailable for the earlier part of the project due to myriad commitments that fall between Thursday and Saturday, and though I made it a point to be involved in the ideation stage, I didn't get to physically work on the project until the latter half of the development stage, which was mostly integration.
What I did do: alongside Bowen, I worked on catching up on numerous group assignments that we had yet to do as a section in prior weeks. It was important to make sure that we were caught up and the responsibility fell on us to do that on behalf of the section. Additionally, I was involved in the integration stage of the actual machine week project; I tested and helped redesign the hopper and actuator as those teams needed, and on the day of presenting our projects in class, I worked alongside Sam and Jason to debug the system (mostly the code) in real time to ensure it'd work in lecture. In short, I had more of an integration/testing/debugging role as part of the main project, in addition to making up work the group had let slip from previous weeks.
This week was a lot of fun. I think our section did tons of great work, even though the swivel base of the gun snapped quite literally an hour before lecture. It worked multiple times beforehand, though, and the computer vision and firing mechanism worked as planned (we shot Sungi as part of a very necessary demonstration). This was a fun distraction from grindy parts of the final project and I'm very thankful to be alongside the awesome people in the EECS section this year.