So right now I am a software guy for a fairly major -atleast major to me- project that could become an international product come February. They want this to be deployed in around the US and Canada. Because I don't want to mention what exactly it is I'm making, I won't say anymore than: It's designed to save dozens of lives per year, and the more that are installed the fewer fatalities per year will be seen. This sucker is supposed to save lives. Because its embedded, Its just has to work. No help from me, its not like a school project. Its a full blown Product at the end. It-has-to-work.
This is where I'm getting a little nervous. There is only one software guy -me-. Which means all the behaviour that this thing does, all the implementation, is going to be done by a fresh out of undergrad EE. With no real world programming experience. I know my stuff, and I think I can get it to run. ...but get it to run perfectly for years at a time without ever faulting once? Shit I'm happy when my little projects run minutes at a time without screwing up.
What I'm getting at here is that, in the case of safety critical programming. It should really be done as a team, of at least 2 qualified people. My way of doing things might work, but might not be fail safe-enough.
If you knew the device that might save your life was tied back to some 22yr old punk E.E. who did this himself in his room late nights on weekends. Would you trust it???
Worries me is all.
-DK
Sunday, November 7, 2010
After a Hiatus, I'm kind of around again.
Jugguling between 4 clubs, job, school, and a social life means I spend so much time in front of a computer. Any free time in there I kind of want to be away from it. You understand right?
Anyway I thought I should put an update here about whats all going on.
One club I am on is a small group of Engineers who are designing a Recumbent Bike for competition in September 2011. This bike is built for speed and should be going to Battle Mountain in Nevada.
I was recruited for some electronic vision, telemetry, and power considerations. They want some cameras on the car to view outside (helping with the slipstream the car can have). Should be awesome! If I can get over my claustrophobia I might be able to try and drive the thing.
For the RobotRacing Team, we've moved on significantly from our winnings in July. >my< vehicle design was changed literally 2 days before competition. Not cool but I pulled something out. It didn't look terrible. Now I'm helping with vision systems as well as Safety, and a slew of other things. We don't know about the competition so its a little speculative on our part right now.
For the Formula SAE team at school I've been bumped up to Electrical Team Captain. Which is good I guess? we don't really know how things are going right now, find out tomorrow. Making a wheel, shifter, main controller, lights and safety stuff for it too.
Finally a Non-engineering team I'm on. Trying to teach kids about the technical side of their everyday lives. A program called Lets Talk Science. We'll see what I can do with them. I feel like I should atleast give back a bit of the knowledge I have now. It's valuable, and could really steer kids into cool new positions in the future. I havent done anything for them...yet.
After that I have a job working on a secret project for a major Canadian ...train company. Can ya' guess? I'm only being a little cautious with name dropping because last time I bad mouthed Hydro One they left some comments for me to read. (Y'all still hiring??). Anyway I'm the code guy for the team apparently. ...I wish I was more hardware but I have a deal with them that they are switching up my program to a Ma.Sc. if I stick with it. Can't say no to that! ....right?
There's been a lot that's gone on since may. No reason to update it now beyond bringing myself up to speed here.
Yeah! I want to start posting useful CUDA code and some image processing stuff here when I get a chance. Appears that some people will find it useful someday. Soon.
With that said, I'm signing off.
Anyway I thought I should put an update here about whats all going on.
One club I am on is a small group of Engineers who are designing a Recumbent Bike for competition in September 2011. This bike is built for speed and should be going to Battle Mountain in Nevada.
I was recruited for some electronic vision, telemetry, and power considerations. They want some cameras on the car to view outside (helping with the slipstream the car can have). Should be awesome! If I can get over my claustrophobia I might be able to try and drive the thing.
For the RobotRacing Team, we've moved on significantly from our winnings in July. >my< vehicle design was changed literally 2 days before competition. Not cool but I pulled something out. It didn't look terrible. Now I'm helping with vision systems as well as Safety, and a slew of other things. We don't know about the competition so its a little speculative on our part right now.
For the Formula SAE team at school I've been bumped up to Electrical Team Captain. Which is good I guess? we don't really know how things are going right now, find out tomorrow. Making a wheel, shifter, main controller, lights and safety stuff for it too.
Finally a Non-engineering team I'm on. Trying to teach kids about the technical side of their everyday lives. A program called Lets Talk Science. We'll see what I can do with them. I feel like I should atleast give back a bit of the knowledge I have now. It's valuable, and could really steer kids into cool new positions in the future. I havent done anything for them...yet.
After that I have a job working on a secret project for a major Canadian ...train company. Can ya' guess? I'm only being a little cautious with name dropping because last time I bad mouthed Hydro One they left some comments for me to read. (Y'all still hiring??). Anyway I'm the code guy for the team apparently. ...I wish I was more hardware but I have a deal with them that they are switching up my program to a Ma.Sc. if I stick with it. Can't say no to that! ....right?
There's been a lot that's gone on since may. No reason to update it now beyond bringing myself up to speed here.
Yeah! I want to start posting useful CUDA code and some image processing stuff here when I get a chance. Appears that some people will find it useful someday. Soon.
With that said, I'm signing off.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Onwards
Well, there's not been many updates here on the progress of the project. Basically, its done. It went well'ish.
We were invited to many things to demonstrate it.
-CH news, Cable 14 in Hamilton, CTV, and the Discovery Channel
Of those, we only didn't do CTV because our robot decided to lose its mind and short out in an impossibly impossible situation. Go figure?
Everything was done pretty well. lots of things could have been improved. If we had a better outlook on what our final project was going to be, then we would have made physical changes that made it better, much much better. Things like lower moment of interia, make it ligher, stronger, more powerful motors, just stuff we ignored because we wanted to just get it to work.
We will soon get a mark for this project, I'm hoping we get a 12, we did do a lot of work and I think it was earned, at least for some of us.
This weekend it will be demo'ed again for some highschool kids, showing what you can do with Electrical and computer engineering. Should be fun!
What I want to focus on, from now on in this blog is the other things im working on, namely electronics on a race car and an autonomous robot of another sort.
I'm working on a pneumatic shifter for one of them. And on a myriad of other things for the robot car. Shall be fun.
We were invited to many things to demonstrate it.
-CH news, Cable 14 in Hamilton, CTV, and the Discovery Channel
Of those, we only didn't do CTV because our robot decided to lose its mind and short out in an impossibly impossible situation. Go figure?
Everything was done pretty well. lots of things could have been improved. If we had a better outlook on what our final project was going to be, then we would have made physical changes that made it better, much much better. Things like lower moment of interia, make it ligher, stronger, more powerful motors, just stuff we ignored because we wanted to just get it to work.
We will soon get a mark for this project, I'm hoping we get a 12, we did do a lot of work and I think it was earned, at least for some of us.
This weekend it will be demo'ed again for some highschool kids, showing what you can do with Electrical and computer engineering. Should be fun!
What I want to focus on, from now on in this blog is the other things im working on, namely electronics on a race car and an autonomous robot of another sort.
I'm working on a pneumatic shifter for one of them. And on a myriad of other things for the robot car. Shall be fun.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Pre-Demo 2 Progress Report
As of today:
What is working now (100% Complete):
-Speed Control
-IR sensors
-Wheel Encoders
What is working that needs some polishing (>60% complete):
-Wireless Communication
-Mapping
-Link Matlab to COM
What needs work (<60% complete)
- Maze Navigation/Discovery
-Realtime Telemetry
-Revise Mainboard
What needs to be started: (0% complete)
- Maze Solving
- Returning instructions to Micro-controller to "drive"
-Poster Board
-Final Report
Extras:
-RC Car mode (40% done)
-Make car more compact (0% done)
-Body Kit (0% done)
Hopefully in the next 3 weeks all of this can be completed satisfactorily. Something that worry's me is this "good enough" attitude we have. We can do so much better. But getting other people into this thing is proving a little bit harder then I would think.
What is working now (100% Complete):
-Speed Control
-IR sensors
-Wheel Encoders
What is working that needs some polishing (>60% complete):
-Wireless Communication
-Mapping
-Link Matlab to COM
What needs work (<60% complete)
- Maze Navigation/Discovery
-Realtime Telemetry
-Revise Mainboard
What needs to be started: (0% complete)
- Maze Solving
- Returning instructions to Micro-controller to "drive"
-Poster Board
-Final Report
Extras:
-RC Car mode (40% done)
-Make car more compact (0% done)
-Body Kit (0% done)
Hopefully in the next 3 weeks all of this can be completed satisfactorily. Something that worry's me is this "good enough" attitude we have. We can do so much better. But getting other people into this thing is proving a little bit harder then I would think.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Update: February Progress
We've ordered a Bluetooth Module. It arrived late January. We're still debating whether or not to use this -untested- module. Or go with something more comfortable, like Xbee's.
With regards to sensors. Wheel encoders work on Interrupts now, (Thanks Me). Late into the reading week I stayed late in the lab and got the IR sensors working properly. This is very good because this means seperately, every peripheral being connected to the pic works.
Figure 1: Output of Sensor and Digital Logic output from sensor
Figure 2: Number of Interrupts Vs. Sensor Decay time. (Each edge is a interrupt)
That's one big phase of the project done.
I also cleaned up the robot. Trimmed some wires and heat-shrank connections. The Electrical tape was so tacky. I'll post a picture of that on friday. One important thing to note is that all the code that is done, is not only done by me, but was done very halfhazardly. It could be done a lot more efficiently.
This brings me to a personal gripe. Why is no one else doing work?? Dan is doing good. But the other 2, I mean I dont think they realize the amount of work that we are putting in here. Luc, he is responsible for the computer side stuff. So, mapping and maze-related things. Right now he is working on the maze mapping. Not bad right? Wrong. He has been working on it for 2 months. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd take a stab at doing it. Within 3 hours. I had a working mapping program that is better than his currently is. ...ticks me off.
Then the other one, Grant. He is responsible for getting the robot to stay on the line. Worst attendance record ever. I think 4 meetings this year so far for him? 4 / 10+ ?
All is not lost, however. I might be pulling this group along. But I'm pulling harder than other groups combined. With that said. As of this post. This is what is left to get our silver level project status:
To do:
1) Combine all peripherals into one mega-project.
2) Get the navigation Pic-side and working
3) Get Mapping done
Only 1 thing there is something I should help with, 1 thing I'm already done. And the last one is pretty simple. Once this is done, we have lots more cool things to add to it. Things this includes are:
1) Wireless Link
2) Remote-Control
3) Route-Planning
4) Body-Kit
5) Line of best fit game thing
6) Advanced Telemetry
...etc.
Of the 4 line following groups, I think were in pretty good shape right now. We also plan on redoing our main-board so that it is professionally fabricated, and will be optimized for our purposes (Removing a V.Reg, adding traces where things were just tied together....and so on).
That's all the update is for now. We'll update again on Friday after our interesting meeting.
--
DK
With regards to sensors. Wheel encoders work on Interrupts now, (Thanks Me). Late into the reading week I stayed late in the lab and got the IR sensors working properly. This is very good because this means seperately, every peripheral being connected to the pic works.
Figure 1: Output of Sensor and Digital Logic output from sensorFigure 2: Number of Interrupts Vs. Sensor Decay time. (Each edge is a interrupt)
That's one big phase of the project done.
I also cleaned up the robot. Trimmed some wires and heat-shrank connections. The Electrical tape was so tacky. I'll post a picture of that on friday. One important thing to note is that all the code that is done, is not only done by me, but was done very halfhazardly. It could be done a lot more efficiently.
This brings me to a personal gripe. Why is no one else doing work?? Dan is doing good. But the other 2, I mean I dont think they realize the amount of work that we are putting in here. Luc, he is responsible for the computer side stuff. So, mapping and maze-related things. Right now he is working on the maze mapping. Not bad right? Wrong. He has been working on it for 2 months. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd take a stab at doing it. Within 3 hours. I had a working mapping program that is better than his currently is. ...ticks me off.
Then the other one, Grant. He is responsible for getting the robot to stay on the line. Worst attendance record ever. I think 4 meetings this year so far for him? 4 / 10+ ?
All is not lost, however. I might be pulling this group along. But I'm pulling harder than other groups combined. With that said. As of this post. This is what is left to get our silver level project status:
To do:
1) Combine all peripherals into one mega-project.
2) Get the navigation Pic-side and working
3) Get Mapping done
Only 1 thing there is something I should help with, 1 thing I'm already done. And the last one is pretty simple. Once this is done, we have lots more cool things to add to it. Things this includes are:
1) Wireless Link
2) Remote-Control
3) Route-Planning
4) Body-Kit
5) Line of best fit game thing
6) Advanced Telemetry
...etc.
Of the 4 line following groups, I think were in pretty good shape right now. We also plan on redoing our main-board so that it is professionally fabricated, and will be optimized for our purposes (Removing a V.Reg, adding traces where things were just tied together....and so on).
That's all the update is for now. We'll update again on Friday after our interesting meeting.
--
DK
Thursday, January 14, 2010
40MHz Reached!
I know, it sounds like nothing. But this blasted thing could only apparently pump out 231kHz before. So this is a HundredFold improvement! Yes, 100 because it Oscillates at 40Mhz, so Operations occur at 20MHz. So…. 20 Million is > 200 Thousand.
Anyways, theres a lot more work to be done. This was a major hurdle. Sitting down and getting that to work. Whats left for my part of this project you ask? Well….
I have to Get the Wheel Encoders Doing their thing. Once that happen I have to get PWM working to the motors with 1 timer. Then Im officially done all the stuff I said I would do, after that it becomes the rest of the teams job to get things to work together. I won’t be sitting back, but I’m not exactly going to be the hardest worker of them all.
Someday this thing will be done. It will be a great day!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)