This week I took a big, step forward, one that I can’t undo if things later go horribly wrong…I glued the various pieces of my prototype together! It felt very final, sealing my circuit board between pieces of plastic, especially considering the amount of troubleshooting I’ve had to do with that circuitry. I’ve put it off as long as humanly possible, just in case anything went wrong and I needed to troubleshoot again, but I reached a point of no return early this week and took the plunge.

Then I spent a long, endless time testing my design to determine its accuracy and precision between 35 and 45 degrees celsius. The water bath I’m using to test my device takes forever to heat and cool and then I also had to spend time cooling the thermometer probe to test how the differences in the starting temperature of the probe affects the end result.

During testing, I also realized that I needed to modify the battery cover in order to ensure that it kept a secure connection between the circuit board and battery.

Near the end of the week, my boss scheduled a meeting on Monday to get updates on my progress and set new goals for the end of this internship. So, on top of all that, I spent  time preparing an agenda/presentation for the meeting, including technical drawings and examples of previous prototypes (I’ve got a whole drawer full, my coworkers like to tease me about it).

Over the weekend, Nathalie, Latané, and I ventured to Mercado Publico, full of salted meat, chimarro mixes, and fresh fruit. While there, my 10-year-old flip flops, my greatest love in this cold, cruel world, my longest relationship ever, broke. Latané kindly loaned me his shoes while Nathalie and I went hunting for replacement flip flops. After that was all sorted, we made our way to one of the bancos, a sort of small dessert/snack shop for waffles and crepes.

Later in the night, Nathalie and I visited Nono Ludovico for dinner, on the recommendation of her colleagues (again, giant shoutout to these guys with their A+ recommendations for food and fun in Porto Alegre). It was a rodizio, a type of all you can eat buffet popular here in Brazil, but specializing in pizza. There were more traditional pizzas such as four cheeses or sausage, but also more unique ones like brie and honey, pineapple and white chocolate, and fig, mango, and doce de leite. Needless to say, we both ate our weight in pizza, a tasty end to the week!