I spent the majority of the week working on the arduino assignment i posted about earlier in order to further familiarize myself with the arduino. It took a lot longer than I thought it would initially but it was a great learning experience and kept me busy while the professor has been away at a conference this week. Unfortunately this meant that I wasn't able to start work on integrating the SD card reader to the arduino till today. Thanks to help from one of my colleagues I was able to get it soldered today and next week we are going to work on getting it wired up. We are also working together to find a suitable water pressure sensor that we can use for the project. There is plenty of work to keep me busy going into the third week. Can't wait to get started!
Remember that tricky problem that I posted earlier, I figured out a solution. It's not perfect yet, I haven't cleaned up the code and I've only tested it a little bit but I believe that it works the way it should. I'll probably have to test it out a bit more and try to break it before I can confidently say it works. Check it out.
So before I even finished this post I found a bug in the old code. So me and one of my colleagues decided to fix it. After breaking what I had originally a few times we finally got a working solution. Yay for collaboration.
Found this while trying to figure out how to get my Arduino to read data from the serial monitor. Although this is completely unrelated to that task, I still thought it was interesting. This does a good job describing the difference between the two.
One of my colleagues gave me a little assignment to help me get more familiar with Arduino and Micro-controllers in general. I've made quite a bit of progress today but I'm not quite ready to put my solution yet. But just in case you were wondering what I'm working on ill post the assignment here so you can check it out. Think you know a solution?
So I'm finally at the end of my first week at the University of Alabama. I've started work on the riverbed project. I spent most of this week working with the Arduino and working on getting the temperature sensor hooked up and operational. The next step will be to do the same with an SD card reader. We may also need to test a pressure sensor on the Arduino as well. These are all things that will likely be tried next week. In addition to work on the river bed project I've also been trying to learn a bit of C#, XAML, and how to integrate Cortana into windows apps so that I can be useful to the other project if need be.
Coming from Informatics to this project so far has been interesting. It is requiring me to use my computer science skills, which I am still just starting to develop, a lot more than I ever have. I've never really worked with robotics, or Arduino, much less wired any of this stuff up or learned much about circuits. This is going to be quite the adventure.
On the bright side I'm getting pretty good at unix commands and using the terminal in Ubuntu, I've also learned a little C and C# in the past few days. So maybe there is hope for me after all. I've been here since Sunday. The trip here was a bit of a hassle, I almost missed my first flight, but I made it in one piece. Yesterday I got to get my first view of the lab and meet the people I will be working with this summer. We got acquainted with each other and the work we will be doing. The project I will be focusing on will involve the collection of data from river beds. While normally this wouldn't be a difficult task, the site that we are working with doesn't have cellular service so we have to find a way around that. A possible solution will be to create a network of short range radio transmitters that will take the data that the sensors collect and transmit them to a relay station where we will hopefully have access to more power and a way to send long range transmissions. I will make another post towards the end of the week with more information after I've gotten more time to work. Until then check out the picture bellow drawn by one of my colleagues its a good visual representation of what we want to do.
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AuthorThis blog is authored by me, Omar White. Learn more about me here Archives
September 2015
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