Organiziation

The plan for today:

1. Check with Sol on the Micro parts order. Yesterday, I verified that the three power supplies he sent would work. This also means we can move to a cheaper power supply, I think.
2. Order parts for the Summer bridge robot. In particular, I'd really like a PIC24HJ128GP502 to play with.
3. p14p work - I figured out an important bug (building the same binary using two different versions of Python). Now, I can code on the PIC24 port and also work on Doxygen generation.
4. Recommendation letter for Brad -- need to do that today.
5. Weekly meeting for the robotics research group. I'd like to do a paper review, but don't have time for that today. The review is due the 22nd?, so I do need to get started.
6. Work on the review paper. It's due the 18th, so I need to jump on it.
7. Update the Micro libs, based on a bug report.

Weekly meeting:

1. Group lunch - Friday at 12:30?
2. Task list - review and update.
3. Review and update group policies - place dates for future sessions.
4. Neat movie found by Krishna
5. Research update
1. Dr. Jones
1. p14p - Progress; working on developing hardware interface libraries.
2. Funding - NASA pre-proposal rejected
3. Met with the Industrial Technology group on robotics collaborations.
4. Turned Buddy's amazing sim into a movie.

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!
   

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.

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.

Classes have started

Classes started today; I've finished my lecture. Although enrollment for the last two spring semesters exceeded 60 students, we're at 50 this semester, so I've started the process of canceling a lab section. I also spent some time updating my syllabus with reading assignments. I'm thinking of trying some selective release features on myCourses to remind students to read; we'll see.

One big problem right now: I can't log in to the Wiki in order to edit it!

The list for today:

• Micro:
  
• Read through Micro papers
• Updated permissions for Google docs access
  
• Get Micro e-mail lists organized
• Work on a Micro exam 1
• Schedule room for Micro exams
• Send lab files to Steve 
• E-mail Justin re: time change
• E-mail TAs re: meeting and plans
  
• Reply to Ian's e-mail re: trunk kinematics
• More e-mail work and cleanup
• Schedule a review with Nick
• Work on my annual review
  
• Schedule lunch
• Schedule a research group meeting

Whenisgood makes scheduling a meeting soooo easy. I've got two pending.

Getting organized for the new year

I'm back at work -- it's been two weeks. Wow.

Some random thoughts and links I haven't had time to really categorize yet: the MSU budget (where is research spending shown?). The ARM Cortex-M3 Technical Reference Manual gives general ARM info, but lacks and instruction set encoding. That's in the ARMv7-M Architecture Reference Manual, which ARM doesn't publicly post (annoying). Of course, it's findable via Google. I wonder if there's a good textbook for the ARM Cortex? I haven't found one yet.

PC fixes:

• Windows Defender kept complaining and couldn't auto-update. The manual install method worked fine (follow the link from here).
• To define a custom paper size in Windows, use File |  Server properties from the Windows Explorer when viewing Printers in the Control Panel (I'd never seen that one before!). However, the laser printer seems stuck on a max page size of 11x11 in. Grrr.
  
• After playing with it, I've decided that Photoshop Elements is a disappointment. I keep wanting to use tools from the full version, which I have on the laptop. Sigh.
• Perhaps this is why the laptop takes forever to resume after sleeping. We'll see.
  

To do:

1. A class schedule for Micro. I need to replace section numbers with page numbers for the reading assignments.
2. Better plans for what I'd like to accomplish this semester.
   

Christmas news

I've been away from the blog for several days and I miss it! So, here's my catch-up edition. First, the sad news: our faithful Canon Digital Rebel XT died last night. An error 99 led me to a nice site with debug info (see update #2). After a bit of debug (shooting with no CF card, no lens, and a recharged battery) still showed the error, I noticed that the sensor cleaning mode didn't open the shutter. Oops -- almost certainly, the shutter is dead. We've used it for 4 1/2 years and close to 100,000 photos, so we've definitely gotten our money's worth out of it! It's now a toy for Alex and Daniel, so they're having a great time with it.

I've been doing some fun reading. It sounds like Boeing is finally ready with their latest plane, a small, economic airliner. It's a stark contrast to the gigantic Airbus A380, a concept I never liked. I've always preferred smaller airports to giant hubs and hope that Boeing wins out with a regional jet instead of a hub-to-hub behemoth from Airbus.

Another fun thing I ran across: nuclear reactor drawings (here are hi-res versions).

I finally had time to play with Skype and the Logitech Quickcam E3500 we bought several months ago. The two didn't work together and, reading on Google, I saw lots of complaints that the two companies blame each other for the problems. In particular, the webcam microphone wouldn't work, or sometimes worked inconsistently. I installed the latest drivers and software on the laptop and desktop to try again. The laptop worked fine; the desktop didn't. More Googling finally yielded the answer: if the mic volume is too high (>90% or so), then the webcam mic doesn't output anything. Unchecking the "Automatically adjust microphone settings" checkbox then manually bring the volume down fixed it. Amazing. Vika had a nice conversation with her family. There's lots of snow on the ground in Almaty -- they showed us a webcam shot of it!

I made some exciting progress on the professional fronts: I finally figured out how to deal with a troublesome term in the limiting-case analysis I'm doing with Durga. I'd thought about looking at a Taylor expansions, but didn't see any nice simplifications from that. However, playing with Maple, expanding just the first three terms produces a very small error. Wow -- I'd been puzzled by that for a long time!

I'm still excited about ARM stuff; I think I'll probably buy the proto board and see if I can find time to play with it during the semester. Speaking of the semester, some thoughts and plans:

For Micro, I hope to improve the course in three areas:

1. Make tests before I begin covering the material. That's just planning, preparation, and discipline.
2. Revise the labs and homework to require students in later labs to get an I2C, SPI, and A/D peripheral up and running. My plan is to develop that in the Spring then implement it in the Fall.
3. Create an in-class demo robot / revised Intro to Robotics robot / recruiting platform / summer camp robot. I think the same robot can serve all these goals, or at least the same basic robot with various minor modifications. Again, I'm planning on developing this in the Spring.

We'll see what I actually get done. That's quite a bit of work! I'll definitely be asking for some help with all this.