SDSMT FSAE Adventures?

Now that i'm in college i can finally join clubs that i can actually do fun stuff in. High school robotics was ok, but that doesn't compare to racing a Formula SAE car around a track. My college has had this program for a while so we have some older cars for new students to drive (dubbed the 03 car). It had some issues so we had to fix those first before driving.

This is the 2003 car for new drivers. 2012 car seen on left

Modding the NERF 6 Barrel Strongarm (Barrel Drop / Swap Mod)

Here at college we have Humans vs Zombies where we use Nerf guns to hunt down zombies (i think there's an assassin game later in the year). People have been buying Nerf guns for the past few months and modding them for better performance (pretty sure Walmart loves it haha). I got the Strongarm and then another one a few weeks later for driving someone on some errands. That means I could then do the barrel swap mod which allows for easy swapping of 6 rounds without having to reload individual darts after every shots. 

Here's an original Strongarm (notice the grey barrel supports). These are the main parts we'll be modding. Ok, stock except for the missing grip, haha.

Fixing "New XAMPP security concept" and "Port already in use" Errors With Apache

Now that im at college and have a decent internet connection, I wanted to try some cloud style music access. And by "style" I mean running my own server from my desktop with all my media and accessing it from my school issued laptop so i don't have to carry around all the music. I first tried Orb which basically installs a program on your computer and creates a database of your media and when you use their website to remote access it their servers contact your computer and stream the media to the remote computer. There are two problems with this: Orb is shutting down soon because it was bought out and media stream was in shitty quality. I then started to look for open source options that dint require a man-in-the-middle server to stream the media (aka i wanted a direct pipeline). I found the perfect choice: Ampache. Its based off of Apache (a basic, but powerful web server) and MySQL. I liked all of its features except that you have to do some server tinkering and i have had little experience, but it was actually quite easy because Apache and MySQL have been put into an installer package called XAMPP which makes it really easy to setup. There are step by step instructions here. Quick note: when installing XAMPP you only need Apache and MySQL for Ampache to work.

Using an Tiva-C Launchpad With Energia (Ardunio IDE for ARM)

If your'e a daily Hackaday reader you should've seen this post a week or so ago. It links to this ARM forum topic: some guy found a 25$ multi-use coupon and shared it with the community.  He and many others bought two tiva-c launchpads for a total of .98$ with the coupon (you can buy anything ya wanted but might as well get some MCUs). I was lucky enough to catch this before the coupon was discontinued and got my two launchpads and then went and searched on how to use them  There is of course the official TI C/C++ compilers or programs, but i wanted to go with something I already knew: Arduino. I remembered the Energia project from a while back that does exactly what I wanted: it uses the familiar Arduino "Wired" code and a similar IDE.