Well, today was a busy day. I spent about 4 hours breaking servos and turning them into motors. Why was I doing this, you may ask? Well, I'll tell you. Next weekend, there's a program at Chatham College called "Expanding Your Horizons". At some point, I may write a node about it. To summarize, it is a program designed to expose 7th and 8th grade girls to possible career choices. One of the workshops at this program is called "Is there a robot in your future?". The girls work in teams of three to build a small robot out of Legos.
I'm going to be helping out with this program, as part of being on the women@scs (scs == School of Computer Science) Advisory Council, and part of helping is assembling all the components. So, apparently, motors are very expensive, but servos are relatively cheap. The only problem is that the servos we buy only rotate 180 degrees in each direction, and since they will be used to drive wheels, we need to break them in order to make them turn a full 360 degrees. So that's what I did.. For 4 hours.
Oh, and this is the best part. So, for the entire 4 hours, we were complaining about the sticky white grease on all the gears inside the servo and how it was getting all over us. After we were finished, Allison looked at one of the packages and found a warning label that said that these servos are known to the state of California (only California?) to contain a substance that causes cancer in lab rats and possible reproductive difficulties and birth defects.. Mmm, yummy. Well, at least I'll know who to sue if 15 years from now, I can't have kids.