Day 3- Supplies and Camera Hacking

Fjodor and I started the day a little slow, as we were both exhausted from the Fourth of July.  We started out today like we have started out the last couple of days; planning on what to cover over the day.

The first thing we started to work on was to continue editing our first laboratory.  We had a starting template from BUSAT, but it seemed very technical.  We were working on making electronics accessible to any middle or high school teacher in the sciences or engineering.

We edited the laboratory until lunch time, and actually finished both the teacher and student editions.  We are going to perform that lab in two weeks, building the components to see exactly how the laboratory works out.

We went to lunch with some of the other teachers, and saw colleagues we haven’t seen much since the start of training.  It was great to catch up and find out what other people were studying.

We then went to an afternoon meeting with Nate, and reviewed our progress for the week.  We would have had our typical meeting date of Wednesday at 1pm, but we had Wednesday off to celebrate the Fourth of July.  We went over supplies, and started talking about our next important task: hacking cameras.

We bought Canon cameras for our balloon launch, but the camera’s features don’t offer continuous shooting for as long as the battery permits.  Therefore, we need to load the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK- http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK) and hack the camera so it provided the features that we needed.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have any SD cards, so we researched the process but were unable to complete it.

The last two tasks we did were 1. assemble a final supply list, and 2. find out if we can run the labs with the other teachers.  We decided we wanted to build temperature sensors with the other teachers and plot possible balloon launch landing zones, to test these labs and receive feedback on them. 

We finally set up a time for July 27th, for the labs to work with the other teachers.  The last thing Fjodor and I need to do in regards to this session is register a laboratory and receive the supplies.

Speaking of supplies, we found the inventory for last year, so we started our purchase order spreadsheet.  We will continue hacking the camera’s after borrowing Nate’s SD card and finish up our order spreadsheet.