Working and Waterfalls

On Monday, we had our second meeting with the new Slice module team, consisting of my boss Franco, another HP employee, Roberto, who does some prototyping work and is providing us with guidance, Juliane and Guilherme, two students from the PUCRS lab HP partners with, and myself.  The meeting was very productive and created a sort of game plan: I would keep modeling the physical unit to hold the LEDs, mics, and other electronic components, while Juliane and Guilherme try to make the microphones work, and we would all look at the LEDs together.

As a result, I spent much of the week CADing the next prototype of the module case and running the 3D prints over night (they were taking about 17 hours each).  Unfortunately, since 3D printers don’t print exactly the dimensions from the CAD file, I had a little trial and error figuring out the dimensions, but by the end of the week I had them down.  On Tuesday I delivered the LED circle and the microphones to Juliane and Guilherme and returned later in the day to test them out.  The software online that goes with the LED ring provided an example code to make the lights do all kinds of cool, rainbow-y stuff, which was fun to play with.  The next day they worked on linking the LEDs and microphones, but as that was all coding, I stayed at the HP office to continue the CAD models. By Friday, during the whole group meeting, the LEDs were responding to some of the commands we wanted, and we got positive feedback from Franco and Antonio.  I also started a 3D print of my more elaborate module base to run over the weekend.  I hope it all goes smoothly!

This weekend was the first time since arriving that we went on a trip.  Saturday, a large group of people from Casa do Campus drove to Gramado, a town about 2 hours away in the same state.  Gramado has a lot of European influence and all of my coworkers have been telling me about it, in particular that it’s a good place to eat.  And I like to eat.

Our first stop after arriving was to a restaurant for Cafe Colonial, which is a breakfast/brunch meal in which they deliver exorbitant amounts of food to your table, including a variety of sausages, cakes, fried chicken, and these other little tasty fried things that I never quite figured out.  Our group of five people also went through about 5 jugs of grape juice–as someone who normally doesn’t like grape things, it was actually very good juice!

Later in the day we drove to a neighboring town, Canela, in order to visit Parque Estadual do Caracol (Caracol State Park).  The main attraction is a lovely waterfall, or chachoeira in Portuguese.

Caracol State Park

We then walked the pathway around the park that followed the river upstream from the waterfall.  Smaller paths branching off of the main one led us down to the river where we got to stand at the base of a smaller set of falls, as well as reach a peaceful part of the river.  I’m really glad we took the time to do the entire walk, because it was the highlight of the day!

Base of the Smaller Waterfall

Finally, to end the day, we walked around Canela and visited the chapel, and then drove to Gramado and walked around a little before heading home.  Overall it was a really nice day trip, but I was exhausted on Sunday.  Looking forward to the next trip, wherever that may be!

Chapel in Canela

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