My most recent project is a CNC router. My roommate and I decided fabricating PCBs is too slow / expensive. Etching is a pain, and CNC machines are cool. No further justification needed… We ended up buying a 7″x7″x2″ kit from Zen Toolworks which we’d been eyeing for a while. Building and wiring the thing was basically extreme IKEA involving an instruction manual written in somewhat comical English. The designers of the control board made the questionable decision of using a parallel interface, and the software that came with it, Mach 3, has a GUI that looks like the font was made by using a JPG for every character. Nevertheless, we succeeded in getting the system to work as a CNC.

Mechanical

For milling boards, we found V-shaped bits much better-suited for the purpose than very fine normal endmills; we were able to mill traces with 0.4mm clearance (15 mil) by setting the mill depth 0.02″ below the board surface. Our strategy to zero the Z axis was to lower the bit to near the surface of the board then loosen it and let it drop onto the surface.

Normal endmill (left), V-shaped bit (right)

We determined (destructively) that the fastest feed rate with the spindle powered directly off a 12V battery (we’re still working on a spindle control board to run it off ~35V, more on that later) is 2″/min.

Spindle Control Board

The CNC spindle board that came with the kit was pretty awful. It has Chinese characters all over it which made it challenging to use (every screw terminal is labelled with the character for ‘electricity’…) and frequently turns off for no apparent reason. The rocker switch they used also has 0.25Ω contact resistance (…)

So we decided to make our own, and create it using our CNC router! I got to work and designed a simple 555 adjustable duty cycle PWM circuit based on this topology, switching the motor low-side. The first rev turned out pretty reasonably fabrication-wise:

Unfortunately I failed and made a primary school mistake, completely forgetting about protection; no diode across the motor, no diode across the FET, no TVS across the power rails… So we made rev 2, with SMC size protection diodes and a truly beastly 2220 22uF ceramic cap across the motor. I don’t know what we were thinking, but it must have been along the lines of ‘better safe than sorry.’ Either that or ‘epic overkill makes us look cool.’

The 2-pin connector goes off to the motor

The cap used to be a 2220 surface mount cap. It broke in half when we desoldered it...

We had some very interesting results. The FET’s drain voltage appeared superficially much like half-wave rectified sinusoidal AC (which would’ve been nonsensical), but on closer inspection and analysis it turned out to be basically ring on a massive scale (at more or less PWM frequency of ~1KHz) about a voltage somewhere between 0V and Vcc. Examining the original spindle board that came with the kit, we saw exactly the same thing happening, but at a much higher frequency and with significant damping. After changing our cap to something more reasonable (10nF) we saw exactly the same thing on our board, though we can’t reproduce our observations in SPICE simulations, modelling the motor as an inductor. The ring is centred on a voltage between 0V and Vcc that changes depending on PWM duty cycle. We’re still trying to work out what’s going on but hey, it works :)

FET's drain voltaged referenced to 0V. 10V/div.

Toolchain

Altium → pcb2gcode → python scripts → g-code → Mach 3 → PCB!

I wrote a bunch of python scripts to treat g-code that pcb2gcode produces. It rectifies unnecessarily large global X and Y offsets that centres the board a couple of board lengths away from zero, which on a 7″x7″x2″ CNC is quite a lot. It also produces a limits g-code file that drills four holes that denote the outer limits of the board, which helps a lot with positioning. To this end I ended up producing a little python g-code library to write g-code to do simple 2-D specific tasks such as ‘mill from (x1, y1) to (x2, y2)’ and ‘drill hole at (x, y)’ etc.

Voronai

pcb2gcode lets you specify an offset parameter which determines how far away the toolpath goes from the edge of the trace. If you set this really big, pcb2gcode just gives you the path that comes closest to meeting the requirement, and the results are pretty cool; the board is electrically equivalent to the one in the gerber file.

Casualties so far

’nuff said. We’re novices, and breaking bits on this is better than breaking expensive bits with the Matsuura we have at the solar car shop. Small price to pay for a process that can take idea to a first rev in under a day.

Next Steps

Our plan is to design a new control board that communicates over serial and can control spindle speed. We’ll probably also write some code to read g-code and interface with it, completely replacing Mach 3. Watch this space; it’s about to be filled with fun toys!

My interest in entrepreneurship, along with my job search, has made 2011 by far the most epic year of my life, and it’s only March. I will never regret my choice of Stanford. I co-founded Dormlink, met the founders of Courserank and Palantir, and had coffee with the founder of BASES, the largest student organisation at Stanford. I’ve also learnt to snowboard, discovered club (and/or partner) juggling and somewhat reinvented my life philosophy (1, 2).

One of the main features of this quarter has been my search for an internship, an exciting but laborious and crushing experience which has been haunting me since October 2010. It hasn’t been easy, especially as a freshman: I applied to over forty companies (from Lockheed Martin and Boeing to Google and Facebook to startups like Addepar). I was completely ignored by about thirty of them and turned down by something like five. I had nineteen scheduled interviews including one on-site interview and two in which the interviewer didn’t call (by the end I felt really bad for my roommate having kicked him out of the room so many times). I got turned down for reasons ranging from poor programming form to lack of experience with Javascript. There were several occasions on which I completely lost hope and I now agree with one of my best friends here that hope is never a positive emotion (and to some extent sympathise with Kierkegaard’s ideas about resignation). I guess that’s what happens when you get your hopes repeatedly elevated then dashed against the rocks by an interviewer forgetting to call you. In hindsight I went through a fairly major (by my standards at least) existential crisis and came out the other side with a reformed philosophy based on perspective and a happy-go-lucky mentality. I’d like to thank my closest friends–you know who you are–for being there for me when I was feeling down and helping me through it.

But I learnt from every dead end, requesting feedback and looking up the things I didn’t know afterwards, and ultimately ended up with several offers: Google Associate Technology Manager, Facebook Software Engineer, Addepar (a truly awesome startup created by a co-founder of Palantir) Software Engineer and Ning Software Engineer. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

So the hard question was which one to go for. I ultimately chose Facebook. I didn’t really have a particularly rational reason for this, but the closest I could get was:
1. I plan to work on the Stanford Solar Car this summer and Facebook is right next to campus
2. The sheer impact I’d be having on the world at Facebook is ridiculous. The user to engineer ratio is something like 1.2M and I’ll be pushing code to 600M people within weeks of starting. This definitely satisfies my epicness criterion.

Throughout all this I’ve become increasingly disillusioned by Google. The more I read about the company, the more I realise that it’s no longer the promised land. It’s become too big and has no choice but to give in to shareholders who are in it just for the business, and whenever engineers cede power to businessmen, bad things happen. Software engineers (and even chefs!) leave for other companies and startups like Facebook (the usual reasons cited are better pay and bigger impact). The recruitment process is revealingly slow, indicative of bureaucracy – to illustrate, I’ve included an approximate chronology (see below). The Google process took almost half a year.

Everything culminated today, Mar 14 (Pi day). I called up the recruiter at Facebook, cycled over and signed the documents. This summer is going to be amazing.

Google

Oct 2010 – Submitted application via website for their Software Engineer summer internship

Nov 2010 – Received email saying they want to interview me for an Associate Technology Manager internship.

Dec 2010 – Interview #1. Went terribly.

Jan 2011 – Still no response. Sent follow-up email. Received an email saying they want to go through to a second interview. The recruiter called to give me some advice (Google Voice dropped the call half way through). Interview #2 was scheduled but they didn’t call. I scheduled another interview.

Feb 2011 – Interview #2. Went OK, not brilliantly. Asked some business (i.e. not technical) questions which really threw me.

Mar 2011 – Received email saying I passed the interviews and they’re trying to match me with a project. They sent me an acceptance email soon after.

Facebook

Feb 2011 – Applied via the CDC Website. Interview #1 and #2 on Mon and Fri of the same week. Quote of interview #2: “[tersely] Doesn’t work. Try ‘[some input]’. Oh wait. [pause] Actually, I think it works.” At the end I asked my interviewer what the next stages are. He said he’ll submit feedback and “to be honest it’s going to be very positive” – AWESOMEZORZ!!!!!!111one. At the end I asked him facetiously about The Social Network. He said Zuckerberg is really a normal guy, the film is completely factually incorrect, but it’s cool that there’s a film about his company :) Days later I was accepted. They called me to tell me about the offer.

Mar 2011 – Intern Day. Went to Facebook HQ (a 5 min bike ride from the Stanford campus). Very cool. A few weeks later I accepted the offer.

Addepar

Feb 2011 – A friend suggested I apply. I sent the CEO my resume + cover letter. Interview #1 and #2 happened. I also had lunch with the team at the HQ in Mountain View. They showed me the product and I got to know the team. I’m really excited about this – I think it’s going to be really big. I emailed them saying I have an offer from Facebook and that I will probably not be doing their on-site interview. They emailed back and persuaded me to do the on-site anyways.

Mar 2011 – Addepar on-site. Got interviewed in turn by several of their engineers. Got accepted.

Ning

Feb 2011 – Two interviews. A couple of weeks later, within the same 5 minutes, I got an acceptance email from Ning and a rejection email from Dropbox. Ning called, telling me about their programme.

Unashamedly stolen from the SSCP website. Click to go there.

In fall quarter 2011, the Stanford Solar Car team is going to Australia – we’re going to race our car across the Australian outback over the course of about 5 days. The race is awkwardly smack bang in the middle of the quarter, which means skipping either the quarter or two fairly critical weeks. At first I was very much against the idea (going overkill on units, getting high grades, blah blah blah), but now I’m thinking very seriously about doing it. In essence, the two main competing priorities here are academic success and epicness, and in my new view of the world, epicness is high up on the list.

In fact, I think that’s how things should be, certainly for myself: my job satisfaction / utility function has large positive partial derivatives wrt epicness at every value of every other parameter. In the words of one of the Solar Car team guys, ‘it’s either going to be epic win or epic fail. But either way it’s going to be supremely epic’. It seems that utility generally has to do with wealth, power and emotional stability, and I think epicness will somehow find a way of satisfying all of the above. Plus epicness is good for street cred (and the resume…)

Those who know me well will agree that I’m very much on the academic side. At school, I used to be more than willing to forgo social activities for academic opportunities and even just front-loading homework to a ludicrous extent by doing it in the common room the day it was set rather than at home that night. I’m something of a perfectionist: the day I got into my head the notion that academic success is more important than anything else, I pursued it obsessively and with abandon.

There are lots of fairly obvious issues with this mentality. The problem is, however, that there are simply so many people at Stanford (and indeed Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford and all the top universities in the world) who have adopted it and, like I did, obstinately cling to it. It’s not their fault. Chances are they even recognise it as a problem and consciously attempt to take steps to mitigate it. But it’s difficult to let go of the mentality that not getting an A is not OK. I know, I’ve been there. Here’s my two cents.

The problem with frontloading work is that it is inevitable that you end up spending more time on it. My idea was to start and finish work quickly to get it out of the way so I can enjoy life later. That has never happened. No essay will ever be perfect, and there will always be something more to do. And of course, like everything else, work follows the principle of diminishing returns: the more you work on an assignment, the lower the marginal utility. So frontloading and obsessive perfectionism results in spending a huge amount of time working on something with very low return!

A solution would be to leave working on assignments until later: procrastination. Epic night-before-due-date procrastination clearly won’t do, but I do think that something like last-minute panic, if handled well, is a healthy way to work. If you’re doing problem sets the day before they’re due and doing fine, it means you’ve handled your schedule well. It means you haven’t wasted time unproductively performing the inexorable and infinite act of editing and revising, and have instead done something more useful. Like meeting people, or having discussions about things you’re passionate about, or turning friends into really good friends, or getting an internship. It’s somewhat analogous to the President passing new laws – if he makes it by the skin of his teeth it means he’s making the most assertive demand he can from congress, whereas if he wins the vote by an avalanche it means he isn’t making a strong enough demand.

Speaking of meeting people, I think that’s definitely one of the most important aspects of college. It seems most people make their best lifelong friends at college. It’s a unique opportunity to meet an amazing group of people who’ve been selected simply because they make an amazing group of people, not because they happen to have the right skills the company is looking for or because they happen to share an interest in some activity. Unless it’s a group project, school work is inherently an unsocial thing, and deprives you of the opportunity to meet this amazing group of people. Most students will be working pretty much solidly for the rest of their lives. There are plenty of opportunities to work. But there are few opportunities to really get to know people of such calibre in life, and it’s a pity to pass up this opportunity for something as mundane as getting an A in a class.

I guess it’s really all about perspective. One of my friends was determinedly writing an obscenely long and unnecessarily detailed response to a question for a 1-unit credit / no credit class, yet couldn’t come up with a response when I asked him what he’s getting out of it. I think asking yourself that question from time to time really does help to put things in perspective, and I plan to use it a lot in the next few weeks/months/years. Life is about achieving your dreams. Getting an A in a class that every freshman is forced to take hasn’t helped anyone I know achieve their dreams.

So what am I saying? I don’t know. I guess I’m saying academics really aren’t that important. It’s a bold statement to make, but it’s far too easy to get caught up in the obsession with grades and GPA. In the real world, NOBODY CARES; the real world cares about personality and skills. It’s much better to have a below-average GPA but have an amazing set of loyal friends and supportive and incredible contacts than have a GPA of 4.3 and miss out on the quintessential college experience and forgo opportunities only college can provide.

Anyways. It’s past 2am. Time to write this essay.

For the techies, it was written in PHP/MySQL and made use of jQuery and the Google Maps API.

Check it out! http://dormlink.me/. So far we’ve only released it to two dorms at Stanford, but you can sign in on the demo account to see what it’s like on the inside.

I don’t have too much time now to do an in-depth blog post on it, so here’s a feature list (some items are yet to be implemented).

Corkboard

RAs often create forms and surveys online and try to get people to fill them in. The current mechanism for getting responses involves simply repeatedly spamming everyone via the mailing list. The surveys aren’t aggregated anywhere so residents tend to lose track of them and there’s no easy way to find out who hasn’t filled in a form.

We solve this with our ‘corkboard’ feature, an integrated mailing list that combines the best of both Facebook groups and email lists, builds upon it. Here, you can sharem comment on and ‘like’ text, pictures and links. With surveys and forms, when an RA links to a SurveyMonkey form (for example), each resident will get that added to their list of surveys to complete and tick off items as they’re completed. The survey poster can then get a list of people who haven’t filled out the form.

People

You can get a list of residents of your dorm. Further, when you register, you enter your room number and you and your roommate get your own webpage. On this page there is a whiteboard on which other people can doodle.

You can also add your classes and major to your profile and find people with whom you share classes and majors. You can then contact the entire group to (for example) arrange a study session.

Stuff

The stuff page is where you can post things you want to sell / lend to others within your dorm. Since the only people with whom you are allowed to interact are people in your dorm, you save yourself having to go into commercial transactions with strangers.

Calendar

Dormlink has Google Calendar integration so if your dorm has a calendar, you can add it to Dormlink.

Places

You can share places of interest with other people in your dorm on an interactive map. I stayed up till 3am implementing this, learning the Google Maps API on the fly.

Projects

We’re considering renaming this to ‘workspaces.’ Here, you can create your own social workspace based on a theme of your choice. This is probably best explained through our archetypal example of dreams: you create a project called ‘dreams’ and post in the description something like ‘post your most interesting dreams.’ People can post, comment and vote on dreams, then sort the entries by popularity to get a list of the top ten dreams of all time. We’re considering extending the functionality of this to other things to enable collaborative workspaces, notes sharing and elections.

That really wasn’t that brief; I should stop doing this whole obsessive writing thing… Oh well, definitely check it out – and watch this space!

Oh yeah, the Stanford Daily also ran an article on it which was pretty awesome. It’s the first result on Google for ‘granola bar stanford daily’ :P

In my first quarter at Stanford I pulled a single all-nighter: after my last final (physics), I spent the entire night in a neighbouring dorm, drawn by the promise of eggnog (which until then I had yet to sample) and conversation (an activity regrettably unavailable at frat parties and the like). We watched Brazil, a seriously whacky film from the ‘80’s, and watched the sunrise over Wilbur Field, saluting every car as it entered the underground car park. We subsequently had breakfast as soon as the dining hall opened at 7:30 then went to bed. Enjoy the little things: spontaneous whimsical expeditions make college life, and that unplanned outing constitutes one of the happiest memories I’ll take with me from the quarter.

By virtuous fortune, I was invited to stay at the house of one of my friends in Saratoga over the December break; thanks – you know who you are :). Last week, we travelled to LA, which is half a day’s drive with breaks (nominally 6 hours) from Saratoga (which is itself half an hour’s drive SE of Stanford), to visit my host’s relatives. Spanish is the unofficial language of the City of Angels, and is widely spoken to the extent that the occasional sign can be observed in shop doors reading ‘we speak English’. As a side note, I was lucky enough to watch a screening of Tron Legacy (2010) in ‘El Capitan,’ which completely blew my mind; all the hype about the CG is just true. It’s amazing. Anyways, in the past month or so, it’s safe to say that I’ve learnt more about American culture than I have during my entire first quarter. Amongst other revelations, the following facts have transpired:

1. Americans do Christmas, and they do it big. Seriously. BIG. Gift opening required a 10-minute break for drinks and ended at 1am.
2. There is no such thing as transport that doesn’t involve a V8 engine, 4-wheel drive and a hunk of metal capable of parting the Red Sea by charging at it.
3. Traffic jams make the M25 during rush hour look like the queue for an ice cream van … in Siberia … at midnight.
4. Hispanics find the Madrid accent that I was taught extraordinarily comical.
5. Westfield Shopping Centre is just another mall, but built about five time zones too far East.
6. The rest of America has Wal-Mart. Silicon Valley has Fry’s. This is another way of saying that I’m currently living in heaven.
7. Acronyms. Lots. But especially at Stanford.
8. Cheap unhealthy food. EVERYWAH. Even in California.

Christmas Lights

Christmas Tree

So basically, last quarter went well. Really well, in fact – I even managed not to fail IHUM (‘Introduction to Humanities’ – a compulsory course). Speaking of which, despite my continual complaints, I think I actually got something out of it. I got a book for Christmas which referenced Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Plato, and I’ve used and referenced the philosophies and ideas elucidated by the authors of the works we studied in (semi-)casual conversation (get me…) But most of all, despite my uncompromising scepticism, the course really has taught me to think, to question and to doubt. I guess it really did teach me something about (ironically) scepticism in the ‘dubitando ad veritatem pervenimus’ sense; I often used to make relatively unfounded and poorly defensible claims which in hindsight must have made me look unnecessarily stupid, whereas I think I am now capable of catching myself in the act and desisting … though whether I manage to put to effect my newfound skills is yet to be determined.

Next quarter I get to do more IHUM (yay…) and PWR, a compulsory writing class. Being renowned for being a stickler and pedant in the realms of grammar and writing style (despite being myself woefully inadequate and inconsistent in those areas), I chose the PWR course entitled ‘Proper English’ which uses ‘Elements of Style’ as a textbook – I think that’ll be fun, and certainly useful. Needless to say, I’m doing more physics and maths. The SSCP (Solar Car Project) and a couple of web programming endeavours will continue, as will my so far fruitless quest for an internship and research opportunities. But a man can be defeated but not broken, and it is with this attitude lifted unashamedly from Hemingway’s ‘Geriatric and the Fish’ that I intend to tackle the next eleven weeks. Bring it, Winter Quarter, let’s see what you’ve got!

Oh and incidentally … happy new year!

We also visited Caltech

The Stanford Solar Car Project (SSCP) is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s undergrads only (i.e. no professors involved) and we build a car that runs on solar power and race it across Australia at the World Solar Challenge. It’s one of the first things I got stuck into, and even before starting any real work on the project, I’ve learnt a huge amount, just by being in a proper workshop with tools and working with genuinely decent equipment (as one of my friends once put it, tools become beautiful once 4th formers [read: 13 year olds] aren’t allowed to use them). I’ve used a soldering iron that works using ‘pure physics’ (as Nathan put it) – it’s simply awesome: RF AC gets pumped through the iron and due to the skin effect, all the current flows through the tip, heating it up; I’ve learnt to solder surface mount ICs efficiently (it actually only takes a couple of minutes to do each one); I’ve used a battery welder in which the current is so high that it’s measured in kiloamps and the cables jump due to the massive B-fields when making the weld; and I’ve learnt to weld and use a mill.

Probably the most exciting thing is the amount of influence a mere freshman with little experience like me is allowed to exert. Before I proceed, I need to say a little about DC to put it all in perspective. DC is the head of the software team, and he is legendary. Apparently he did CS 140 and got a girlfriend in the same quarter. Descriptions of his physical feats reminded me of Alcibiades’ description of Socrates – he apparently did a 10 mile mountain hike in flip flops—one of which was broken—without complaining and managed to fall asleep on asphalt in the middle of the desert with people shouting and engines running all around. DC’s programming ability appears to be revered within the team … and that’s coming from people whose skill sets include welding their names in cursive handwriting on 1” iron bars and solder surface mount ICs on flying leads … without a breakout board … in 20 minutes. So when I suggested a method of wiring the solar panels and his response was along the lines of ‘we’ve never thought of that before, we might implement that’, and subsequently let it be my call how to implement an entire software project, I was … a tad surprised.

As a sidenote, I think the best quotation to date on the SSCP has to be ‘Everything seems to be working except the ON/OFF switch’ (!)

P.S. List of non-American expressions that I use

I’m compiling a directory of these; supposedly Americans don’t use the following vocabulary / idioms:

‘Take the piss out of’ ≈ ‘to make fun of’
‘Bollocks’ ≈ ‘oh crap’
‘Lie in’ [n.] = ‘sleep in’
‘Half eight’ := 08:30
‘Query’ [n.] ≈ ‘question’
‘To get done for doing something’ = ‘to get caught by the authorities for doing something’
‘Shotgun’ (I extend its usage to just about anything; equivalent to claiming dibs on something)
‘Posh’ [adj.] ≈ ‘classy’ / ‘fashionable’

It’s through the use of some of these that I’ve managed to provoke several ‘oh you British people’ from my roommate…

P.P.S. How to like Stanford

This algorithm seems to work for me:

1. Find some random freshman
2. Talk to him/her
3. Be surprised

I could elaborate, but the fact is that Professor Harry Elam really wasn’t kidding when he declared at convocation that every single person is here for a reason; everyone I’ve met, without exception, is simply amazing.

EDIT: It still hasn’t rained yet

Welcoming Latino students to campus

I flew from Heathrow in the economy section of the upper deck of a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 over South Greenland, Hudson Bay and the Rockies, and landed on Sept 2nd, well in advance of Int’l Student Orientation (ISO) on the 11th. Over the course of the week, in between setting up bank accounts, getting a phone contract and buying a camera (Canon Rebel XS + 18-200mm lens – blog post about it later!) I took the opportunity to explore the bay area. Golden Gate at night from the Marin Headlands is spectacular. The road on which Steve Jobs lives is beautiful. The wildlife on the Monterey coast is diverse and exciting. The weather is unbelievable. I visited Mills Hospital where I was born, and caught a glimpse of the house of my babyhood on Diaz Lane in Foster City; coming from drizzly, noisy, bustling London (which I of course still love), I am convinced that this part of California is the best place in the world to live.

And of course, I visited the campus on which I am to spend the next four years of my life, and it is best described as … indescribable – one really has to see it for oneself to understand truly what all the fuss is about. At every turn, from every angle, at any time, the sheer quality of the facilities and the opulence of the college blows me away. Just to illustrate with what I know of the sports facilities: the Arrillaga Sports Facility has a pristine fitness centre with modern equipment including some I’ve never seen before, a rock climbing wall with 6 routes set every week and an enormous basketball court. On the other side of the lawn, the Ford Recreation Centre has a gymnastics gym larger than my secondary school’s sports hall. Behind the tennis courts are four outdoor swimming pools and an American Football stadium. South of the main university is a Stanford-owned area of gently rolling hills larger than Richmond Park in London known as ‘The Dish’, named for the large satellite dish placed at its centre. West of that area is SLAC, the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, a luxurious golf course and a stables. Ridiculous is a word that springs immediately to mind. Ridiculous awesomeness. Plus campus has hummingbirds and a bamboo plantation.

On the 11th, ISO started. Apart from the cheesy, artificial and often cringeworthy icebreaker activities, the fire alarm that woke up the whole dorm at 3am, the most tuneless anthem I’ve ever heard (‘Hail Stanford Hail’) and the beach trip which was overcast and windy (ergo cold), I now genuinely believe that I couldn’t have ended up anywhere better. On the second night we had the opportunity to eat dinner with a faculty member. He teaches energy options, and in the ensuing discussion, I discovered that I am in the company of a class of, for lack of a better word, amazing people. The sheer knowledge, intelligence, passion and lust for knowledge infused with exceptional self-confidence (but not arrogance), communication skills and life experiences of some of the people I’ve met makes me feel like I’m in the company of an unequivocally brilliant set of people and that I’m going simply to love the next four years of my life. There were two debaters who took part in that discussion and both had a truly ridiculous amount of knowledge and breadth. They had exceptional understanding of the argument from political, social, economic and scientific perspectives, and the arguments and ideas they came up with and articulated eloquently were simultaneously inspiring and overwhelming. I subsequently met someone has very similar academic ambitions as I (physics with a CS twist) and is actually doing the same IHUM (Intro to Humanities) course as me, for the same reason (interest in philosophy). An appreciable proportion of the people I’ve met do programming to a level that exceeds casual interest (a fellow Brit did got through to the British Informatics Olympiad finals … and also does rock climbing). The people here are a hand-picked bunch of ludicrously well-rounded students, and it really makes a difference; I have yet to meet someone who falls into a stereotype – we have athletic, artistic and eloquent techies and logical, philosophical and scientific fuzzies. At first I had some deep academic concerns about choosing Stanford over Cambridge for precisely this reason – I believed that well-roundedness necessarily precludes expertise in any particular area. As it turns out, I was completely wrong, and the opposite is abundantly true. At the convocation speech, the following joke was made: “what do you call someone who only speaks one language? American”. But from what I can tell, a very large proportion of my peers are bilingual (at least). And speaking of people, Reed Jobs is in the same class as me (Stanford 2014) and I saw his dad, the CEO of Apple, at convocation. Just putting that out there…

Steve Jobs at Convocation

Then New Student Orientation (NSO) began. All over campus, the freshmen, a.k.a. ‘frosh’ (if you’re in the UK, read: ‘freshers’) started to arrive and the entire campus had a festive atmosphere. Each new arrival was personally raucously and vociferously greeted by a bunch of ecstatic Residential Assistants (RAs – sophomores and upperclassmen who have volunteered to help with freshmen dorms), and I finally met my roommate! Having gone to a day school and still used to the single-room paradigm at universities, I was slightly nervous about this but it seems Stanford really did their research and have come up with a good match – I think this arrangement will work out very well indeed.

Roble RAs welcoming incoming freshmen

I can’t talk about everything I like / am impressed with / have noticed. I haven’t even mentioned how beautiful the campus is, or how I have yet to see a raindrop. But here is a selection of stuff I happen to be able to remember off the top of my head.

Dorm Themes + cheers

Every dorm has a theme – mine (Otero) is ‘Moterotown’, a mutation of Motown; Robles has ‘Pirates of the CarRoblean’; Burbank’s theme is my personal favourite: ‘The Burbank Theory’, based on the famous TV comedy show ‘The Big Bang Theory’. They even have a poster pointing to a place on the couch saying ‘Sheldon’s seat’!

Further to this, there is a lot of class and dorm pride. Each dorm has several cheers, so at large events we can make our presence loudly felt (we also like shouting ‘FOURTEEEEEN!’ to demonstrate class pride), and after overcoming the initial self-consciousness it’s good fun and seems to contribute to a sense of family, spirit and bonding; I can’t think of a less clichéd / cheesy way of putting it but I’m absolutely genuine. According to the guy I bought my SLR from, his son went to Stanford and his freshman dorm was also Otero, and every year, for some reason or other, the people always bond really well and build longer lasting and deeper friendships with each other than at other dorms. I can see this being true of our dorm this year (our discussions are open and honest, and other people have commented on our spirit and energy when cheering) which leads me to suspect there’s some selection process going on, in which case I’m proud and delighted to have been chosen for Otero. Oh yeah – every dorm has a baby grand piano, a table tennis table and a flatscreen TV in its lounge.

There’s a football game tonight – Stanford v Wake Forest – at our stadium and since I’m irreversibly caught up in school pride, I will be attending and noisily supporting the two footballers who happen to be in my dorm (they’re *enormous*!). Relatedly, in events in which we’re going up against Cal-Berkeley, a popular cheer is ‘Beat Cal’.

Academics

Since classes haven’t actually started yet I can’t say much, but we did have a talk on an incredible CS project undertaken by Stanford students on AI. They developed a robot that could recognise images using what seemed to me as a particularly intelligent statistical approach to AI and image recognition and could (for example) walk to the office to get a stapler. There was also a demonstration of reinforcement machine learning in which a toy helocopter was doing ridiculous stunts all on its own. As it turns out, half the people involved in the entire project were undergrads. There are also incredible opportunities here. If all my near-future plans works out, I’ll be getting an inside-scoop tour of SLAC, meeting and possibly working with the quantum computing guys at IBM and meeting Prof. Leonard Susskind, a legendary string theorist. This is why I chose Stanford.

Speeches + discussions

These people really know how to do inspiring speeches. Dr Harry Elam is one of the strongest speakers I’ve ever heard, and at the end of every speech, regardless of the speaker (yeah there have been quite a few…), I’ve felt inspired and excited about being here. And I’m not normally impressed by this sort of thing.

There was also a ‘Faces of the Community’ event which consisted of some cultural dancing / music (e.g. Japanese drums, jazz dancing etc) but also talks from some really exceptional people (low-income, queer, ethnic minorities, disabled) talking about themselves. All their talks struck me as candid, honest, open, courageous – they must be truly great people to be able to accept their situation, and despite it make a real difference in their community, succeed and thrive in one of the world’s leading universities and above all stand up in front of 2000 strangers and open up. There was a subsequent discussion in the Otero lounge and many of my peers expressed similar sentiments to my own. Speaking of which, throughout NSO we’ve been having reasonably regular dorm discussions on multifarious topics, and again the openness and open-mindedness of our small community’s members is remarkable.

Unrelatedly, on another occasion there were some (pretty damn great) musicians in a band who had to do this cringeworthy music-camp style thing encouraging people to listen to each other. They got two volunteers to come up on stage and play the bass guitar, and they ended up giving away two guitars! I’m not sure what to make of that – it’s an incredible gesture, sponsored by some music company, and whether it reflects more the wealth of Stanford’s alumni or the university’s will to get people to try out new things is debatable. I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make (if at all), but something tells me that sort of thing wouldn’t have happened had I chosen Cambridge!

Geekiness

Despite what I said about well-roundedness, Stanford is undeniably geeky, but in a good way. I received an email whose first line read: “Dear awesome members of Group n, where 0<n<=24 && n∈N*". During our first dorm meeting, the Resident Fellow set out the dorm rules, beginning with 'Don't be stupid'. He continued to define stupidity as 'an act that significantly increases the probability of physical, psychological or financial harm occurring to you or someone else' (I personally think it should be 'an act that significantly increases the expectation of the sum of physical, psychological and financial harm occurring to you or someone else' but hey), and gave a load of examples of stupidity. Abstracting everyday concepts and working with them for sake of argument (and/or comedy) is the sort of thing I do on a regular basis; I think I'll fit in just great!

Health

I’ve managed to go on a jog every morning so far, including one 60-minute run which was a result of my getting lost… Californians are normally pretty health conscious but I am determined never to develop a shape whose parameters can be summarised by a radius (i.e. any sort of spheroid). Let’s see how long this is going to last… There was also a swing dancing class as part of NSO which was very reminiscent of Ceroc which I used to do (a bit) in London. It’s actually offered as a 1-unit class and therefore contributes towards a degree. It was also good exercise.

Miscellaneous

There’s a free bus service (‘the Marguerite’) around campus and nearby bits of Palo Alto, which apparently used to be horse-drawn (it’s now powered by hybrids, or something green like that). Stanford is also the most bike-friendly place I’ve ever been – I’ve seen more bike parks around campus than I have in the whole of London, and buses (including the Marguerite) have bike racks on the front.

The food is also pretty good. It’s not quite as luxurious as the specially-arranged food I got whenever I was at Cambridge for events (this includes Trinity, Corpus and St Cats) but it’s very decent, and much better than what I’ve been eating at school for the last ten years.

One thing I’ve noticed is most stuff in America is cheesier than most Brits would expect. The Kennedy Space Centre had some of the cheesiest exhibits I’ve ever seen, and even here the icebreakers and cheering etc. just make me feel self-conscious and uneasy and serious points made in these situations just make me want to laugh!

So yeah. Beat Cal!

I apologise if this post is probably not massively helpful to anyone thinking of applying: it’s most certainly biased, contains only one point of view and it’s written by someone who’s only been here a week. It’s more of a stream of consciousness affair – a disorganised and ineloquent splashing of ideas onto a page, and I haven’t said everything I want to (if I had, I’d’ve written an extremely fat book). I just wanted to say I’m happy, and am sure I made the right decision after agonising for literally months over my choice of Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge. In almost every comparison I’ve subconsciously made of myself with my year group at Stanford, I’ve felt inadequate and overwhelmed. I used to think I was pretty clever, but I now know that’s really not the case. For the first time in my life I’m acutely aware that I’m in the company of people who will shape the future and create the world of tomorrow – I’ve finally found a group for which I believe it. I feel that this is where I belong but simultaneously massively outclassed in every aspect. It’s bizarre, and wonderful.

Stanford at night. It's damn pretty.

(Also, please check out my pics. “Click to embiggen” applies to all the illustrations in this post.)

The CanSat Competition

Our CanSat

By means of introduction, we were taking part in the first ESA European CanSat competition – a competition to build coke can sized ‘satellites’ that are to be dropped from 1km up (fired up there by a rocket) and drift down to earth using a parachute, taking data as they descend. The thing was organised by ESA, took place at the Andøya Rocket Range (ARR) and was overseen by NAROM (National Centre of Space-Related Education, translated into Norwegian to make the acronym).

The primary mission was to take temperature and pressure data, and teams were required to come up with and effect a secondary mission. Ours (Team Eclipse) could be classified as ‘advanced telemetry’; we were to take measurements of GPS position, speed and course, and acceleration and heading data, to create a wind profile of the various wind layers encountered during the descent. This could be used for the deployment of a hypothetical second payload – to allow the crew to drop the package at exactly the right location for it to fall to an exact position on the ground. Such devices actually already exist and are known as dropsondes and are used by the RAF for similar purposes. We were sponsored by Mattherhorn Investment.

Here’s a quick overview:

Pressure sensor

Used the one that came with the Pratt Hobbies CanSat kit
Calibrated it using bell jar and Pasco altitude datalogging meter
Confirmed at RAL [we did some testing at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory] to within experimental error

Temperature sensor

Tested at RAL until batteries conked out.
HMC temp sensor seems not to work, but resists calibration owing to wide scatter
Instead derived function using thermistor’s datasheet. Inferred temp as a function of thermistor resistance using Eureqa, CanSat transmits raw voltage, crunch numbers at ground.

Battery

Conked out at low temp (-15°C). Trying to insulate it. Fulfils 3 hr lifetime requirement at room temp.

GPS chip

Needed to import a few libraries
Needed a voltage regulator to get PCB’d
Needed an antenna + connector pins to be bought
Takes time (anything from 45 seconds to 10 minutes) to boot up + acquire satellites
Very temperamental, often just doesn’t work
Antenna was loose, had to secure using araldite

Accelerometer

At first thought there weren’t enough ADCs on the microcontroller, invented logic / switching circuit; but found more ADCs on board
Needed calibration
Used as redundancy for HMC
A short killed it. Needed to buy a new one two days before flight

HMC

I2C Protocol, took forever (research) to get it to work
In meantime, Plan B: get magnitude of accel using analogue accelerometer and use GPS data points (D speed / Dt) to work out accel bearing (this plan was ultimately abandoned when we worked out how to use I2C)
Poor documentation, took 2 days (12 man hours) to work out interpretation of tilt/roll/bearing, and finally worked it out
Discovered tilt/roll are calculated from accel data on chip to get ‘down’ vector, and are redundant data, so factoring them in resulted in apparent constant direction of accel downwards with varying magnitude (!) Chose to assume tilt/roll = 0 for entire flight, just use heading data. Interpretation we took so long to work out was barely used!
Tested using home-made centrifuge

Centrifuge used for testing accelerometer in HMC - consists of Pasco runway on top of turntable, CanSat sitting in bucket

EEPROMs

Nearly didn’t fit, constructed I2C stack to house it all, caused short due to space shortages

Voltage regulator

Adding EEPROMs in late with extreme limitations of space, +Vcc contact pushed through insulation + touched earthed CanSat body, caused short, fried V regulator
Had to buy Zener diode minutes before shops closed (no stock of 3.3V 3-pin regulators)

The two fried components we threw out at the ARR

Printfloat

The NAROM guys accidentally gave all the teams a buggy and redundant function to print floating point numbers so we spent some time debugging this

Data Flow Diagram of our system

Harvester

Adapted by me from a Visual Basic example program
Dumps raw data to file

HAL

Written entirely by myself in C#
Scrapes + treats data from raw file
Outputs treated data to csv
Outputs GPS trace
Calculates + outputs wind profile

Visualiser

Written entirely by myself in C#
Uses DirectX to display a 3D visualisation of the wind profile

Day 0 (Sat 14th Aug) – Preparations

We had a pressure sensor and thermistor-potential-divider temperature sensor. There was a voltage regulator (3.3V) which powered the entirety of the secondary mission: an analogue accelerometer, a digital compass with a built-in accelerometer (the HMC), four EEPROMs which we had added at the last minute, and a GPS chip.

We hadn’t actually done much proper work on the CanSat until a couple of weeks before going to Norway, though we had done a balloon test. We needed to get the go-ahead from the Civil Aviation Authority to fly weather balloons to 100m altitude from our school playing fields but one balloon managed to get loose and flew upwards out of sight, resulting in several awkward phone calls to the authorities and the end of our balloon test! Due to lack of planning and an abundance of problems (including shorts, loose connections and general unticked to-do list items), we ended up doing our actual balloon test on the last day (a Saturday), the day before we left for Norway with a dummy CanSat using video cameras to judge position and speed etc. The reason for our lack of operational CanSat was a short which fried our voltage regulator and analogue accelerometer, though at the time we only knew the regulator had fried and were assuming the worst for all the 3.3V components. I had to rush to Maplin on bike in the rain and arrived exactly at their closing time, at which point I burst in, dripping and dishevelled, and announced to a group of bewildered Maplin employees ‘I need a 3.3V voltage regulator. It might seem funny, but this is a bit of an emergency!’

I ended up buying a Zener diode, as they had no 3-pin regulators in stock.

Day 1 – Journey Up

I discovered non-vicariously that traffic conditions between Barnes and Heathrow are amazing if you wake up at 4:30 am. The Team Eclipse representatives (Matthew Willetts, Tim Palmer, Jacob Ader, Dr Stephen Patterson and myself) convened at 5:30 at Heathrow Terminal 3 with a broken CanSat and a load of equipment (breadboard, croc clips, multimeter, araldite, superglue etc.) – as Tim pointed out, it was clear from what we packed that we hadn’t a clue what was wrong with the damn thing… We were joking at this point about the probability of getting everything working. We figured it was about 1/256 – 50/50 for each of 8 components.

An interesting feature I noticed about Norway’s airports is the fingerprint-based security (apparently phased in about 4 years ago) which replaces the need for a boarding pass and passport after initial check-in. It was incredibly (surprisingly) efficient, secure and functional, and I personally think the UK is sorely in need of such a system.

Our travel itinerary was slightly ludicrous and to get from London to the Andøya Rocket Range where we would be staying we needed to make three flights: London-Oslo, Oslo-Tromsø, Tromsø-Andenes (and of course a taxi journey from Andenes [Apparently the airport in Norway with the second longest runway] to the ARR). We met the Czech team on Oslo before our second flight and flew with them to Tromsø, and we shared our Tromsø-Andenes leg of the journey with the Belgians and the Norwegians.

We did manage to take a peek around Tromsø during our stop. There are two cathedrals, both of which we managed to visit (though only from the outside) and a long bridge from one side of the river / bay to the other. We also discovered at this point that the GBP is ridiculously weak against the NOK – just about everything at Tromsø cost about 1.5 to 2 times more than it would in London… We did find these things called ‘boller’ which were hot cross bun-sized sweet bread rolls which were going for 3 for 20K (approx. £2).

Tromsø's main street

Tromsø's main square

A view of one of the cathedrals from Tromsø's large bridge

The prop plane that took us on the last leg of our journey - from Tromsø to Andenes

On arriving at the ARR we had dinner² (the Norwegians have two dinners; the first a heavy one, the second more of a supper snack type thing) when I first tasted Brunost, a type of brown cheese Norway is famous for. As someone put it, you either love it or hate it; I guess I fall into the first category. We were told that there was to be no alcohol at the ARR (to much groaning) and then worked on the CanSat until past midnight. We also quickly botched our presentation together (it appeared that we were the only team that didn’t know we needed to do a presentation the next day), confirmed our primary mission components and HMC were working, and discovered the second analogue accelerometer had fried.

The Andøya Rocket Range Hotel

Day 2 – Presentations and work

There was an opening ceremony in the morning

Opening the competition

Our presentation was extremely rushed as we had attempted to fit 6 months of work into a 10-minute presentation. Luckily the entire competition was in English, so we could talk very quickly and wing it a little. We even managed to throw in some Boris Johnson humour and unpreparedness…

We were then given a talk on the Norway Space Centre, whence these (rushed and probably mostly factually incorrect) notes come:

1st rocket launched was 60 years ago, named after Ferdinand the Bull, to investigate noctilucent clouds which are ~ 82 km up, ~ -130°C, humidity ~ 10^-6 sea level humidity; wanted to investigate meteoric clouds as a cause.

Svalbard has 24 hr darkness in the winter, good for Aurora Borealis

Norway owns plenty of ocean; if ocean area were taken into account, Norway would be the second largest country in the world (to Russia)

NSC launched its first satellite recently (July 2010) – a side 20 cm cube satellite weighing 6 kg; geostationary; manage ships in ocean.

Microgravity ecology on ISS. Had to build 50-60 M EUR flowerpot!

Svalbard is the best representation of a Martian landscape on Earth – found chemicals there unique to Mars (!)

There are no Norwegian astronauts as the NSC concentrates more on building stuff

Every year ESA do a space camp thing in Norway – the students build an actual rocket, put instruments inside and launch it.

Torstein Wang from NAROM (Torstein literally means ‘Thor’s Hammer’. How awesome is that?) then gave us a talk on the intruder rocket which was to fire our CanSats into the cloud layer to be deployed. Here are some more notes:

Modified Intruder rocket (great name), but lengthened
0-1.9 s after lift off – fuel burn, rocket gets to max speed
Delayed charge set, rocket goes at constant speed to 1 km altitude
Explosive charge ejects nose cone + CanSats
Using Yagi antennas

We were then given the evening to work on our CanSats. We managed to get the voltage regulator, EEPROMs and GPS chips working, much to our relief. Stephen (the school physics technician who was overseeing our project) explained about the De Broglie-Bohm interpretation of QM during a spare moment, then everyone except myself went to bed – I (along with the Spanish team as it transpired the following morning) pulled an all-nighter to get an EEPROM program working. At about 4am I got bored and climbed a very steep mountain next to the ARR and was rewarded with a truly spectacular view of a sunrise over distant mountains.

I took the Union Jack to the top of the world at 4am

Sunrise over Andoy - staggeringly beautiful

Microwave antenna at the ARR

Day 3 – the launch

I awoke when Stephen opened the door of the electronics workshop to find me sprawled across three office chairs with an enormous platter of crisps on the table – I think I might have dozed off for half an hour or so. The rest of the team entered soon after with my breakfast and we discovered a fault in the radio transmission board. Panicking, we grabbed spare boards from another team and NAROM, and Tim set about debugging a piece of electronics already scarred from months of resoldering. As it turned out, it was just a loose connection to the antenna.

The launch was at Skarsteinsdalen and on the bus ride there I had to do some emergency reprogramming to fix a small problem related to the EEPROMs. Being Paulines we forgot to bring the audio cable to connect the radio receiver to the laptops so ended up having to borrow one. We also discovered at this stage that our alkaline batteries would not survive 30 minutes of flight due to voltage drop (the Zener diode was also a less efficient regulator than the 3-pin one and wasted more power) so ended up having to borrow a lithium one (which retains the same voltage over its lifetime) from the Belgians. We tried to insulate the battery and warm it up to prolong its lifetime by first putting it under Jacob’s armpit then putting it in a bag and dipping it in hot Earl Grey tea!

Our launch!

The Intruder Rocket

During the actual launch the GPS chip, the most important one to our secondary mission, failed and we collected no GPS data. Our (in hindsight way too large) parachute, however, deployed beautifully (we had only worked out how to fold it the previous night and had never tested to check it would open) and thanks to the lack of wind, the thing landed 700 metres away, within the 800m competition limit. We ended up using nothing but accelerometer data to do some Euler’s Method enormously fudged ‘integration’ to get what looked like a decent wind profile and GPS trace. We even ended up having to solve a horrific second order non-linear differential equation to get wind speed as a function of acceleration and the CanSat’s ground speed using Wolfram Alpha (and linear programming to get the constants). We also created the second presentation to present our results.

Beautifully deployed parachute. Photo by Matthew Willetts

One other dramatic moment was when the rocket containing both the Spanish and Czech teams’ CanSats misfired – the first part of the fuel burnt, but owing to (presumably) some sort of blockage the fuel stopped burning for one or two seconds and by the time the CanSats were ejected the rocket had almost hit a mountain, and both teams got mere seconds of data. The Belgian team also blamed us (in jest) for their own lack of GPS data – their GPS stream stopped at the same time as when their accelerometer registered a spike, which corresponded with when our CanSat was dropped into the rocket on top of the Belgian one. We both eventually decided to (still in jest) blame ESA for not planning the thing properly and putting two GPS-enabled CanSats in the same rocket! Though we did feel a bit guilty afterwards.

By the end of the evening I had slept for 10 hours in the previous 72 and quite rapidly conked out.

Day 4 – presentations and result

Most people in the room seemed pretty impressed with our Google Earth and Visualiser visualisations and we managed to time it just right. We got a tour of the ARR and received a talk on NAROM:

All profit goes to organic growth
They have a student rocket programme in which the students take part in the entire operation of building a rocket, launching it to 9 km and analysing data.
They have cool projects like ANSAT and CubeSat

We were then sat back in the main conference room for the results. We were massively sleep-deprived and our best attempt at a joke was ‘the Irish are going to shame us’ which looked pretty likely when they announced the third and second places (the Belgians and the Irish respectively). And finally, first place: ‘we selected this team because they were well-organised and always calm’. It wasn’t us. ‘We have decided that the British team, Team Eclipse, have won the first ESA CanSats in Europe competition!‘ I was apparently too stunned to stand up for a couple of seconds… In the end every team won a well-deserved special award, including the tightest budget and the best outreach.

Wind profile visualisation

In the aftermath, for the first time everyone was free and available to socialise. We played a couple of games of Mafia, took photos and had a BBQ. The Spanish seemed to find my attempts at Spanish inexplicably amusing and I discovered that a member of the Spanish team had worked on a similar electronics problem that I had previously and talked with him for a while on that (in English) – apparently many of the other teams had been forced to take special English lessons for this competition. I found myself in the midst of the friendliest likeminded group of people I had ever met, and really started to enjoy myself.

We also took part in a local tradition of swimming in the Arctic sea – the cold shock made me feel numb and warm stepping out of the sea into the wind which was slightly concerning. The full routine was swim-sauna-cold shower-sauna-jog, and by the end of the evening I had had 16 hours of sleep in the previous 96, but was still feeling physically amazing and revived.

Swimming in the Arctic Ocean

Day 5 – whale safari

We started the morning by talking to a Norwegian reporter who described London as ‘too warm’ and to whom we said we would celebrate by ‘sleeping … a lot’. We (the UK and Belgian teams) went mountain climbing with the help of a map of a good route that I had drawn after my previous ascent. We even found a guest book near the top which we all proudly signed. We lunched rapidly and moved to some really quaint cabins (which reminded Matthew of Cape Cod) in Andenes where we were to spend the night. We bought plenty of spirits and beer (Norwegian Dahls beer is better than Budweiser in my opinion) and I grabbed myself a kilo of Brunost… The Norwegians told us that if you kill a crow, cut off its legs and hand it into the police, you’re entitled to 50 Kroner. When we asked them the reason for this strange law, they responded nonchalantly, ‘they steal our strawberries’.

Signing the mountain guest book

View of Andenes from the top of the mountain

The whale safari which we had signed up for followed. The journey out was probably the roughest journey I had ever had (with the exception of a couple of sailing outings I had previously done) and we sighted two sperm whales. We dined at Andenes’ former jail which had been turned into a restaurant, and ethical issues aside, medium rare whale meat is delicious. What followed was an evening of drink…

A sperm whale!

We found a flagpole. We had a flag...

My photography 'skills' really don't do the sunset justice

A precedent for what happened later...

Day 6 – journey back

We found our CanSat story in two local papers, though one of the published pictures featured us kneeling next to an upside-down union jack. Though considering the photo had been taken just after our launch and we had just discovered we had no GPS data, we were effectively in distress and the orientation was justified. On the way back, for the first time we were questioned about the CanSat at airport security (an aluminium cylinder with wires sticking out) which we explained by showing them the newspaper article! At an idle moment the Norwegians, whose travel itinerary followed us to Oslo, explained a little about their coinage – the 20K piece has the Norwegian king on it (Norway being one of very few countries in which the monarch has any real power), and the 200K note has a picture of the guy who discovered the science behind Aurora Borealis. We said our final goodbyes and took off for Heathrow Terminal 3.

Distressed Union Jack

On the way back the rayleigh scattering from the setting sun lit the clouds beautifully from above.

Concluding thoughts

We’d started off intending to win. Over the course of half a year, as we encountered setback after setback, made agonisingly slow and sometimes negative progress, and lost active team members, we discovered this project was a damn sight more difficult than we had originally anticipated, and morale fell to dangerous levels. We came to Norway with a tin can filled with smoking components and frayed multicore cables, hoping not to win but just to get some data of any sort. Cortisol levels reached personal lifetime highs for every one of our team members at the ARR, and sleep dep began to drive us literally and quite disturbingly delirious. Despite this, we won a European competition, made some amazing friends, took some great photos of the staggeringly beautiful scenery and learnt some lasting lessons. It’s been an amazing experience, and I owe the guys at the ARR, NAROM and ESA, as well as my teammates and everyone else who took part, my sincere gratitude.

The Team Eclipse Norway representatives. Top row: Jacob Ader, Matthew Willetts, Dr Stephen Patterson. Bottom row: Bryant Tan (myself), Tim Palmer. Photo by Dag Martin Nilsen from NAROM.

It’s a Super Absorbent Polymer (SAP) and can be found in nappies, and is also a component of slush powder, sold in magic shops. So I went to Davenports Magic Shop, a slightly dodgy looking place in the Charing Cross subway, bought a can of the stuff and tested it out.

It works best with pure water, but even one teaspoon can solidify a whole cup of Brita filtered tap water (standard activated carbon filter).