Week 9: Day 028 - The Grand Project #2

Hello there! I have decided to call this "The Grand Project" for no specific reason at all. It's just going to be a grand thing! Anyways, we've made some great progress on this in the past week.

First, we moved on from last time by adding the latest addition to the Pi, which we received from the IT guy here. We plugged it in to the Pi directly, and... it didn't work. The whole thing just froze and skipped frames. Why in the world would this happen?! We tried to figure it out by unplugging and plugging stuff back in, but I will give credit to where it's due. The intelligent Marco (Take a look at his blog: www.linuxubuntu2.blogspot.com) found out that the disc drive was taking up too much power! Since there wasn't enough power as a whole being given, we needed to find a way to provide enough power to the drive. At first it we were wondering how to do it, but then it occurred to us that we could simply get a powered USB hub. Problem was, where were we gonna get it?

Next, we went to the teacher leading the project, Mr. Nolen, and asked him where we could obtain one. We couldn't find the IT guy, so we couldn't get it from him, so Mr. Nolen ended up taking us to a bunch of boxes in the autotech area of the Career Center. Basically the boxes were full of stuff from his predecessor, and man did I see some great stuff in there. Whoever had his job before him, was a hoarder! This guy had tons of ram, motherboards, and whatnot, not to mention a couple of headsets too. However, we needed to find the USB hub, not all that stuff. Once again, Marco came through by finding a USB hub which worked. The next step was to find it a proper power cable that worked. We found one that seemed it could work, so we took it back, and just as we thought, it didn't work. It was too small and fell out to easily, obviously not the right one. I let Marco continue doing work for his other class, and I went back to the boxes to find the power cable.

Once again, I have to stress that whoever was there before Mr. Nolen, was a hoarder, he kept so many power cables in these boxes too! It took me quite a bit of time, but eventually, I found the right cable that worked!!! We plugged it in, and just as I thought, it worked. We were ecstatic at the fact that it finally worked. In fact, Mr. Nolen hailed us as geniuses, which was a bit humorous to me, since we bloody aren't!

Finally, we needed to get the wi-fi to work on this thing. Well, turns out this would cause a lot of problems. The great Mr. Elkner gave us a wi-fi adapter, it was a really small one, the size of a bluetooth. We just put it in the hub, and to our surprise... it didn't work. What could have been the problem? We suspected that perhaps it was another power issue, which it wasn't really. But then once I looked up the details, the USB hub was pretty bad. It used USB 1.1 which had slow data transfers, and it only had 4 USB ports. Then I thought, you know what?, I'm gonna get a new one! So then Shams, who's also part of the project, went with me to find the IT guy, who's actually called Mr. Randolph. We knocked on his door, and he wasn't there. Then outta nowhere I heard "Mr. Randolph" from downstairs. Someone was calling for him, and then I poked my head down the railing, and he was standing right there! I exclaimed, "Hey, we need something for the project with Mr. Nolen!" He came up, and low and behold, he had exactly what we needed. He gave us a Belkin USB hub, it had 7 ports, and it was USB 2.0 which was a good upgrade. This time, it came with a power cord haha. We got back, and Marco once again brilliantly solved the wi-fi problem, by figuring out, that it was disabled. I set up the new hub with him, and then Marco ssh'd into it and enabled wi-fi. We connected to the concealed network that Mr. Elkner is quietly keeping haha (not sketchy at all), and it worked just fine.

In conclusion, we went to Mr. Nolen and he was ecstatic, and as always said "gangster" as a happy response to our progress. Now, it seems that the next step is to work on the car, so I may not be doing as much on this "grand" project. But so far, I'm pretty happy with what we've achieved. On that bombshell, thanks for reading, and goodbye!