FIRST Robotics Season 2010 Begins
Posted on January 11th, 2010
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.
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ECE 175 Tutoring
Posted on October 26th, 2009
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.
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Digital Logic Lab in Lab View, C, Java
Posted on September 17th, 2009
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.
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Development tools for College Students
Posted on September 4th, 2009
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.
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Programming in C, Cheat Sheet for Development
Posted on September 4th, 2009
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.
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Radioactive Decay Correction in Labview
Posted on August 1st, 2009
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
Filed under Computer Science, Computers, Development, Engineering, Lab View, Optics, Research, Robotics, Software | No Comments »