Michael Palmer's Portfolio

FRC 2010 Robot Shipped

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:40:41 +0000

Yesterday, was the “ship day” for all the robotics teams that compete in the FIRST program. We have been having some issues with our Robot, specifically, our kinematics. We are using Meccanum wheels and it seems that our configuration is just not working well. The frame seems to be taking a lot of the stress from the robot. During the three weeks break before the competition, I will be re-working the code, and hopefully find a way to balance the right motor control.

Now that the robot has shipped, I will be able to spend more time focusing on Optics and the websites that I work on. It would be nice to finally grind through some C and labview in hopes to post some good tutorials. I’m also interested in learning how to develop apps for the iphone.

Writing Lab View Curriculum

MrPalmer — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:12:41 +0000

In the next few weeks, I will be consolidating a “reference” manual for Lab View as well as a “student guide.” I am eventually interested in turning this into a book, but for now, it will be a class curriculum.

The links are as follows:

Freebird Robotics

http://www.polytechfusion.com/HowTo.html

http://www.polytechfusion.com/ReadJoystick.html

http://www.polytechfusion.com/AddConnector.html

http://www.polytechfusion.com/ColorThreshold.html

Classroom Demos

http://www.cord.edu/faculty/jensen/LabVIEW/Demos/Default.htm

http://www.cord.edu/faculty/jensen/LabVIEW/index.htm

FIRST Bytes Outreach Program for Women

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~firstbytes/summercamp/labview.html

Wordpress Theme Modification

MrPalmer — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:09:22 +0000

I’m finally beginning to fully understand the inner workings of wordpress and how the themes work. I’m hoping to modify this theme to add specific styles beyond the WP multiflex 5. One of the frustrating parts is that bolding doesn’t work in posts. Now that bolding finally works, I can move onto specific parts according to the theme. I plan on changing some of the colors and image properties. Hopefully this won’t be too difficult. Now, I’m currently trying to decide whether to put ads in the center of the design or if I should just join the two rows together into one solid design. As of right now, I’m thinking I should combine the two rows as one large one, with no space in the middle.

FIRST Robotics Season 2010 Begins

MrPalmer — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:16:06 +0000

The 2010 FIRST Robotics Season has finally begun. The students and mentors from Flowing Wells High School are pleased with this year’s game challenge. The game consists of six robots competing in an arena with four “speed humps”, two low clearance spots, and goals to score from. In the end game, robots that can “lift” themselves off the competition floor recieve extra points. If one of the robots is suspended on another and not in contact with the field, extra points can be scored. This game is going to be challenging. The kicker is that the robot has to weigh less than 120 pounds.

Winter Break Projects

MrPalmer — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:57:48 +0000

This winter break, I have decided to stay in Tucson, hoping to get a lot of work done and hang out with some friends I don’t get to see too often. I am currently working on several projects and must prioritize them. I’m looking to finish a few web sites: pimawebdesign.com and team1798.com. I’m planning on launching an MMORTS game called at feudalwarfare.com. Among other projects, I am interested in learning how to develop games for the Android platform. I am also interested in expanding the development network that I have by adding several tutorials for C, C++, Java, PHP, etc.

ECE 175 Tutoring

MrPalmer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:31:29 +0000

I am currently providing private tutoring for ECE 175 at the University of Arizona. The course is Computer Programming for Engineering Applications and is a challenging class which deals with Unix, basic C programming, and advanced C projects. I have preceptored the class under the supervision of Dr. Srini who has been teaching it for a long time. The course cheat sheet is online, and I will be working on a review for the material covered in the second midterm. If this is of interest to anyone browsing this site, please feel free to comment. It may speed up the process.

Digital Logic Lab in Lab View, C, Java

MrPalmer — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:03:31 +0000

I am currently taking a class in Digital Logic at the University of Arizona Electrical and Computer Engineering. The course is ECE 274 Digital Logic and Verilog. This class is very resourceful in understanding how electricity works and how machines are controlled through circuitry and microcontrollers.

I hope to pass on this knowledge to the students that I mentor at Flowing Wells High School Robotics. This week, the students learned basic electronics and circuits by using the Snap Circuit kits by Elenco. I instructed them to build logic gates: AND, OR, and NOT. They did build the gates, and learned how each one functions. I built a Lab View program to demonstrate the important concept of these logic gates. I will expand this example to cover more of the gates and then develop examples in C and Java.

Expect the result to be posted in two weeks. This will be a good lab experiment for Engineering and Computer Science classes.

Development tools for College Students

MrPalmer — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:35:15 +0000

I have been looking around for various tools that College Students can use to quickly climb the ranks in the software industry. One industry leader, Microsoft, has released much of their development software for free to students in college. This software is expensive compared to the FREE tools that have been created through Open Source. This is an excellent move on Microsoft to boost more traffic to their platform.

The primary website for this is called Dream Spark: https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/ProductList.aspx. Other websites include Microsoft’s Academic Alliance: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/default.aspx. This website is great for colleges and high schools, it allows students to download more Microsoft Software including some Operating Systems.

The University of Arizona College of Engineering has a membership, and I have enrolled this year. I have already downloaded Windows XP and Windows 7, Visual Studio, and SQL Server 2008. These programs are advantageous and I will be using them immediately.

Programming in C, Cheat Sheet for Development

MrPalmer — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:11:41 +0000

I have programmed in C ever since the beginning of high school. Once in college at the University of Arizona, I begun working more with the FIRST Robotics Competition using a Microchip CPU, while taking an electrical engineering course at the UA which dealt with programming in C. I have created a few cheat sheets about using C as a general language. It includes all the keywords and most of the important functions used in C. I may define them on a seperate page, and write a few in depth tutorials. Please comment about this if it is wanted. The C cheat sheet was written so that it is not operating system specific, however it is good to know how to develop on multiple platforms.

Eventually, my Robotics Team at Flowing Wells will begin using the Microchip controllers and we will also publish information relevant to programming the chip using Eclipse as the C/C++ IDE along with the minGW and mcc18 compilers.

Radioactive Decay Correction in Labview

MrPalmer — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:04:25 +0000

I’m currently working on a Point Spread Function routine which uses radioactive isotopes. In order to effectively take measurements for PSF the decay time must be calculated and corrected based on the user’s isotope and initial integration time. I’m working to include the majority of radioactive isotopes. This would allow the engineer to access the isotope from a drop down menu, without having to know the half life in seconds. Documentation would be provided showing successful implementation of the algorithm and the math behind it.

This Decay Correction routine will be a stand alone virtual instrument (vi) in Lab View that will be accessible to use in other projects. The Decay Correction needs two different time values to calculate a change in time. It may be useful to put this vi inside a series of loops and to have the initial time be calculated outside the loop.

Link to download -> Once finished, this will be live.

If you have struggled with Decay Correction, I would advise you to visit the two sites below. They were very useful in understanding this process. If you are interested in this .vi, please drop me a line. I would love for it to be used in a project.

Links:

http://www.mcgill.ca/ehs/radiation/basics/decay/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_correct