Want an Amazing Week

Man, what a great week.

Some cool weather has finally made it to Florida!

I managed to get up at 3am yesterday and today to watch all of the ROSCON 2015 talks.  Fantastic info.  Feels like robotics are at an exciting tipping point, lead by ROS (the Robotic Operating System) on the software side.  So many ideas…

Our seven-year-old daughter blew everyone’s mind at Parkour this week when she made it up the eight-foot warp-wall for the first time.  So proud of her.  She set a goal and worked her butt off to make it happen.

Several great business and personal projects in the work, including an amazing project my wife Lis is building for our son’s Halloween costume.  He is going as Scout from Team Fortress 2 (TF2 is his favorite game) and she is building a custom Scattergun for the costume.

As part of that project, she asked me to design and machine a handle for the Scattergun.  I hit VCarve Pro and built this prototype out of MDF on the Shopbot.  The final version will be made from real wood and aluminum; and have a working trigger.

While we worked on the build, our kids and a bunch of the kids from the neighborhood held a battle bots competition in the garage.  Sphero’s new BB-8 held its own surprisingly well against a Nerf Haxapod, MiP and custom Android-controlled Lego NXT spiderbot my son built & programmed.  Good times.

Then we wrapped the day with this sunset.

Making sure I stop to reflect on how amazing life is right now.  I’m seriously grateful.

P.S. Thanks for the TF2 Scattergun blueprints HVDprops.  They worked great as a starting point for the build. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/x9w71/i_just_finished_the_blueprints_for_my_scouts/ )