The xFIRE, a robotic fire extinguishing platform that was developed as part of a class project, was featured this past weekend on the national hacking and electronics blog, Hack-a-day. Ben, Kara and I are ecstatic that our little project was able get this kind of recognition. All of the comments have been positive so far, if not hilarious too. I never thought that we would be contributing to the eminent robot apocalypse!
Check out the writeup on Hackaday or go right to the source!
I’m giving a short workshop on using Arduinos to my friends at Engineers for Sustainable Medical Development (ESMD), a relatively new student group at the University of Pittsburgh. The idea is to get students familiar with the options out there for developing electronics . Arduino is a great choice for novices and first timer who are looking for a quick proof of concept without a lot of hassle.
When I was the graduate mentor of this group last year, I gave a similar workshop that had three sessions. This year I decided to go with a more concise, step-by-step introduction to get students from various backgrounds familiar with the general microcontroller concepts, rather than attempting more complicated hands-on projects.
Here are the slides if you’d like to following along or investigate for yourself:
We are four weeks into the fall semester here at the University of Pittsburgh and there’s no turning back now. It’s been interesting getting back into the lecture-style education after an 8-month hiatus of independent learning. Here are the courses I’m taking this semester so that I can get a master’s degree in electrical engineering by December:
I think the latter two classes will provide a good background in control of robotics systems. As for VLSI, sometimes you just need a 4 credit course to round out the requirements. I’m keeping pretty busy between lab reports, homework, exams, looking for jobs, and side projects, but I’ll try to keep the content rolling out. Cheers!
New YouTube videos have been uploaded (now made with 50% more love and 5% less MSG) !
Check out the new video for the xFire Project Page:
And here is the ultimate montage recording my encounter w/ Stephen Colbert:
I made both videos with Adobe Premier Pro (CS5.5), which I highly recommend because of the ease in editing and the small learning curve.
I’ll start with the end of the story:
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Article
Huffington Post Article : WARNING – My name is miss-spelled all through this article.
Pitt News Interview
Penn Hills Progress Interview
Greetings from glorious Chicago! This week I am attending the 2012 annual conference for XSEDE, a partnership for delivering for ‘high end digital services’. In short, they give researchers and scientists access to supercomputers and all related accoutrements. There are some really exciting tutorials in using High Performance Computing (HPC), as well as interesting research presentations. Tune in for the full report!
Link to the full Post: TBA
As of last Tuesday, I decided to leave Dr. Tamer Ibrahim’s lab here at the University of Pittsburgh, where I have been doing my research work for the past two years. Moving forward, I think this will make a positive change for all parties. I am ready to work on new, exciting research projects, where I can contribute my hardware, software and problem solving skills in creating truly innovative solutions. Thanks to everyone in the lab for all the great experience and memories!
Peruse the site for some of the projects I have worked on for the past two years; Maybe you’ll want to hire someone who:
I had the privileged of being accepted to travel for free to this year’s Open Science Grid (OSG) User School hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). Read on to find out more about how the trip went!
In my own words, OSG is a partnership that works with universities and other research institutes to promote the use of High-Throughput Computing (HTC). In more lay terms, it’s like a sharing service for service for supercomputers. If you owned a bunch of computers, OSG works with you to share them with other researchers who need them to crunch numbers. In return, you get to borrow other’s resources if you need a boost. For scientific plebs such as myself, they can also hook you up with the leftover computers and more importantly, drop some supercomputing knowledge on us fools.