Meetings and e-mail

Bob passed on a neat quiz on embedded C. Wow -- I only got a 70%. Good stuff! The only annoyance is the registration requirement.

I've spent most of my morning working through e-mail, scheduling meetings, etc. It's amazing how just e-mail backs up.

Today is our research group meeting. Topics:

1. Introductions - Justin and Jae-Pyung are new.
2. Videos - from Ankit and a paper to review.
3. Machining help - the Industrial Technology group is will to make things for us.
   
4. Research update - everyone talks about what they're doing and any recent progress
1. Me - My focus is marketing, followed by the paper with Durga.
1. Ankit's movie 
2. Summer bridge / Micro demoBot / Intro to Robotics base - with Cory
   
3. The SECON movies are now on my YouTube channel.
4. Three of our group's videos will be featured on the IEEE RAM YouTube channel.
5. Prepare a quad chart, two slide summary, three slide summary of the group's research.
   
6. Brainstorm on a good image / movie to showcase our group.
7. Web site updates and improvements.
   
2. Buddy - dynamics works!
5. Procedures
1. Review group policies. New: responsible conduct of research requirement to receive NSF funding.
2. YouTube videos and audio tracks - from what I can tell, our videos don't constitute fair use. We need to use only free music. Sources:
1. http://freesologuitar.com/, -- checked; this is truly FREE.
   
2. YouTube's AudioSwap -- but they reserve the right to put in ads.
3. Google for "free legal mp3" gives http://www.bestmp3links.com/ (unchecked), http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/08/31/35-places-to-download-free-legal-mp3s-music/ (unchecked), and more.
   
4. http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio (unchecked)
5. NOT FREE: http://freeplaymusic.com/ prohibits free usage for Internet videos (see item h on their terms of use), charging $100 per song!
   

Marketing, maybe?

Tuesdays and Thursdays are my marketing (and research) days. However, there's always the odd task or two that still needs doing before I get to that. Today's surprise: converting the bootloader to 2005 forced me to fix some whar_t to char conversions I'd ignored earlier. That turned into a project, but is done now.

While I still have the trial version, I'm now working on converting the full SECON movie to YouTube.

Sounds like military robotics is hot!

For marketing, things I can think of:

• Publicity
• Submit my robotics movies to the IEEE RAM YouTube channel by e-mail to Johnanthan Roberts (videos at ram dot ieee-ras dot org).
• Send my robotics photos to srikanth dot saripalli at asu dot edu for use in a Robotics and Automation Magazine cover.
• Publish something in the department newsletter
• Marketing
• Post Ankit's video when it's ready
  
• Improve our group's web site
• Come up with an idea for an amazing image or movie to showcase our group.
  
• Create a quad chart to summarize research group thrusts.
• Put together a one-slide, two-slide, and three-slide research group summaries then meet with Lori, Gary to get their feedback and ask them to shop these ideas for me.
• Work with Jean, Mike to publicize and recruit.
  
• Funding
• Look for and apply for funding of any sort I can think of.
• Continue writing and revising my CAREER proposal.
• Schedule an Eglin visit.
  

I figured out how to embed a playlist without creating a custom player: it's hidden in the "Edit playlist info" dropdown. Here's the SECON 2008 full version:

Family favorites

It's always interesting to see what Alex and Daniel like. Some of their favorites, found during the snow and cold weather recently:

• Why it's important to drive carefully on ice.
• What cold animals do in a Florida zoo.
• A water balloon to the face.
  

More fun videos:

Administrivia

It seems like I'm just tying up lots of loose ends today. That's not much fun, but certainly is necessary.

• Micro:
• Attendance sheet
• Prereq checks
• File folder labeling and clean-up
• Lab writeup editing
• Create a ZIP with the latest library
• E-mail Tommy re: Summer bridge purchasing
• Yearly review writing
• Record laser cut tutorial again
• Return a call

In working on some YouTube videos, I'm now trying to only use free audio tracks. Though it's still confusing how all this works (when does this constitute fair use), using only free music is best. Which leads to the question: what are good free music sources, not contaminated by commercial songs from a website which claims only free content? Perhaps YouTube's AudioSwap is easiest, and should be 100% legal. But it seems like I can't mix in more than one song and ads may still be displayed.

SECON movie uploaded

I spent time with the DivX Author trial and split the shorter version of SECON video Graham created into YouTube-sized pieces then uploaded them. Here they are (as a playlist -- watch them in series). The first video is the teaser Graham produced.



To embed this playlist, I used a custom player (YouTube | My account | Custom video players). Then, I had to play around with the size to get the aspect ratio correct. I wonder if there's an easier way to do this?

Atmel

A student in Micro asked me if I'd considered Atmel's AVR when choosing a microprocessor for the book. I knew they didn't offer a C compiler and were limited to 8 bits, but little else. I did a bit of research and was impresssed:

• There's one AVR core; the various families (tinyAVR, megaAVR, etc.) add features but share the same core. See the diagram to the right. Nice!
• The AVR instruction set contains two 16-bit pointer registers for indirect addressing, compares and signed/unsigned branches, 16-bit addressing for data, a multiplier, and a stack. It's nice.
• As shown in the overview, there are lots of DIP packages, great for breadboarding.
• There are third-party C compilers, but no well-supported free ones. That's a big minus.

I realized that I need to use tags (i.e. labels to Blogger) to keep track of my posts, so I've started using them.

Dropbox

I'm using Dropbox to share a video editing task with a student. What a convenient thing -- it's so much easier to use than SVN.

Today's list:

• Micro:
  
• Work on a Micro exam 1
• Look through and edit lab files
• Fix homework #1
• Prereq checks
• Create attendance sheet
  
• Work on my annual review
• A bit more e-mail
• Re-record bitmap to laser cut video
  

But instead of doing this, I went to an excellent lecture on Gen NeXt by Mark Taylor. He had some neat ideas: moving lectures onto video and using class for problem solving. I'd love to do that, but it's a lot of work. Getting some in-class demos working this semester will be a good step in that direction, however. I also still want to re-record my tutorial on laser cut conversions.

Alex is tired of doing his weekly reports. Maybe I should stop requiring these for him.