How I spent my summer vacation

I've been pretty swamped this summer with work related things.  This past week I was at a workshop on remotely operated vehicles (underwater robots essentially) and how to teach students how to build them for a competition and classroom projects.  It was a lot of fun, but pretty exhausting - we had really long days and in addition to all the lectures we went to, we had to build a robot in groups and then show them off on the last day.  We did everything from soldering circuit boards, to waterproofing our robots to writing the control software.  All in a week!  I am pretty exhausted, but excited to share everything I learned with my students.  Here are a couple of pictures of my team's robot and control station:

Yay!  It doesn't leak!

ROV control station

The robot itself is made out of PVC pipe, but that's what makes it affordable for classroom use.  One of the best parts of the workshop was meeting all of the cool people involved.  Our workspace was at a local community college's auto shop and the guys that run the place did an amazing job of hosting us.  One night, during a late robot building session, they even hosted a cook-out on their custom BBQ:

Auto-shop BBQ

That's an old Honda Civic and the engine has been replaced with a huge BBQ pit.  It was pretty amazing.  The trunk was full of speakers too so that while you grill, you can enjoy some tunes.  Pretty impressive.  I can't believe John hasn't done something like this!  If only he had somewhere he could get an old beat-up car that doesn't run ... :)