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By Zachary, April 16, 2011 8:29 pm

Enlight has now completed the lastest round of Engineering Expo. The Expo is a three day event where children come to see how awesome engineering is. For our exhibit, we brought out the jump pads. The jump pads were attacked to an Arduino such that sent serial messages over USB to a computer that ran the fountain. A lot of people had a lot of fun making the fountain go.

Having fun on the jump pads

While it was mostly fun, there were a few technical difficulties. When the kids ran the big jets, the spillway quickly filled with water. There was so much water that the sidewalk water level sensor kept tripping as if it was clogged. We just kept resetting the sensor and waited for it to fill again. By the end of the first day, we got about 123 emails from the cRIO telling us that it was clogged. We shut the water bypass to the pool and the amount of emails seems to have gone down significantly.

We also had the small model of the fountain out along with some blinkey lights.

Thanks to everyone who came to help out! Everyone who stopped at our booth seemed to have a good time.

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By Zachary, April 9, 2011 9:31 pm

Did you ever realize how hard it is to run a fountain? As the years have gone by, we’ve depended on the senior members of our group to be able to run and understand what is going on. This year was a bit more difficult and took several days to get everything working.

It started off innocently enough. On the north end,we started taking the lights down and checked to make sure that the valves were aligned properly.

Checking the valves

On the north end, we set up the pump to drain the pool. The hoze didn’t exactly want to say on, but we made it anyways.

After the drain, it was shovel, shovel, shovel.

The next task was to clean off the lights in the south end. We noticed that over winter there was a “small” amount of algee growth. It also seemed to accumlate on the lights just a bit. Eric fearlessly cleanred them off with some HCl.

We also took note of some of the damage on the fountain.

Now we could start working on filling the pipes. We set up the bubble tubes, and were greated by drudge.

Yummy!

While the pools filled, Eric wanted them to go faster so he decided to get out the big guns.

We had to wait a while for everything to get ready, so there was plenty of time to relax.

Eventaully the bubble tubes filled with clear water and we got the fountain running for all to enjoy!

Children playing by the fountain

It was only later that we realized that something was wrong. Danielle was walking past the fountain when she noticed that the fountain was only spraying out dribbles. She shut of the pumps and tired to look for what was wrong. We got some people out there to check things out. THe problem appeared to be an open drain. When we had been cleaning the pool, the south end pool drain was opened and never fully shut. We closed the pipe and now everything appears to be running smoothly.

Enjoy the pictures!

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By Zachary, April 3, 2011 1:22 pm

One of the big parts of Enlight is giving back to the community. This past Saturday, we set up a booth for the Science Expeditions to demonstrate a robot that Dustin built. It drives around and follows people using a sonic sensor to determine distance. When it is picked up, it beeps! The children that came to the exhibit were very excited and interested in the robot, and we hope that exhibits like these inspire the new engineers of tomorrow.