the path

After months of procrastination, I have finally put together the project page for the LMD18200 H-bridge motor driver. I uploaded all of the schematic and PCB documents as well as a simple bill of materials.

In the Residences section of today’s edition of The Palm Beach Post, my dad came across one of the research projects that I’ve been involved with and working on for the past eight months. The Gator Tech Smart House is a home located in the University of Florida’s Oak Hammock living community and caters to the pervasive computing needs of the elderly. Written by Sue Kovach, the article gives a brief overview of a few of the sensors located with the home. It gives me a strong sense of pride to know that something that I’ve had a hand in designing is appearing in newspapers and is gaining some kind of public knowledge — even more so when the Australian Discovery Channel airs what was taped in the house earlier this year. Most of the projects college students do never amount to anything, so I’m happy to see the success for everyone involved.

I looked but was unable to find the blip on The Post’s website, so I’ve attached the completed article at the bottom of this entry. Below is Youssef Kaddoura holding one of the boards we are about to replace with the platform that I’ve designed.

The Palm Beach Post Article

• Page 1
• Page 2

More information or a better description of the Smart House can be found in an issue of the IEEE magazine or from the Gator Tech Smart House website.

When I hear something like the following, all I want to do is die:

“… congratulations to [some person] and their team over at [some company] …”

It seems fake, impersonal, and the fact that people seem to be so eager to use it makes me want to crawl into a world where the the word team has been forgotten. We as a society need to think of new diction and come up with another way to describe a group of people working towards a common goal.

After a little work getting the page to match the rest of the website, I’ve finally put up my source code to display text on an LCD screen in 4-bit mode using a microcontroller. It isn’t earth shattering technology, but is a good start for anyone looking to do something fun with embedded microprocessors and is also a useful for debugging the integration process of sensors and actuation for robotics.

The source, pictures, datasheets, and explanation can be found by following the project page links at the side of the page or simply going to the 4-bit LCD.

Earlier today I booked my flight to Trondheim and now I’m getting more and more excited about the trip. I’ll be leaving on Saturday, August 27th, at 5 in the afternoon. At around 8am the next morning I’ll arrive in Amsterdam, Netherlands — just in time to catch the 9am flight into Norway. I’ll have the majority of Sunday and all day Monday to go into the city and surrounding areas. Even though during the other four days I’ll have to be at the conference, there will be some some interesting social events in the evening.

On Monday night the mayor of Trondheim will be hosting a gathering at the oldest secular building in Scandinavia at about 800 or 900 years old:

The organizers also have a boat trip to see the Norweigian fjords, a couple of museum tours, and even a large banquet dinner. Probably the thing I’m most anticipating is getting to see an organ concert at the Nidaros Cathedral — a massive building that’s been around since the middle ages.

A one week trip to a completely foreign land is both exciting and scary. I don’t speak (nor have I have I ever tried) Norwegian Bokmål or Nynorsk — the two official languages of the country. It’s funny that in elementary school — fourth grade to be exact — I did a report on Norway… I never thought I’d actually be going there, though. The Norwegian Kroner (NOK) to US dollar (USD) exchange rate of 6.62:1 won’t really help me too much because from what I’ve checked out on the web everything tends to be more expensive there (due, in part, to the VAT).

Hopefully the site update looks nice and keeps away the comment spamming robots from posting. We’ll see.

It’s been quite a while since there’s been any action from me on here… I’ve been way too lax about posting, and too busy to be anything but. That isn’t an excuse because if the time wants to be found then it will eventually be found. I looked tonight and found some 600 spam comments — but that’s to be expected when I haven’t even checked the site in over a month — resulting in me having the moderate the comments so they won’t show up right away if posted.

The real purpose of me getting back into the swing of things is to share some good news. As it turns out, the array embedded hardware systems I’ve been designing and testing for months is going to be used in a demonstration at this year’s VLDB conference in Trondheim, Norway, at the end of next month. Apparently this is one of the premiere database conferences in the world so having something I designed be on show is an honor. I don’t exactly how it all fits in to a database conference but I’m leaving all that up to the software guys to integrate.