Tim’s Blog

So I got an unexpected call today from Brian, the CEO?? of Image Labs International, saying that I got the job. I need to call up my boss (Scott) tomorrow to figure out a time to start work. Wow.

2 days ago I got an email from the ece-jobs mailing list at montana state about an opening for an intern at a company called Image Labs International. I visited their website, read the description of what they were expecting of a new hire, and decided that it was out of my league. They said they wanted a 3rd year student and I had no clue what some of the things were on the list of things they wanted the hire to do. All they wanted was a resume emailed in, so I said what the heck. I sent the email expecting nothing. This morning I got a call and they wanted me to come in for an interview. So after my ee lab ended at 4pm, I got dressed up and rode my bike a couple miles to their office.

Image Labs International does some really cool stuff. They focus on machine vision applications. They are one of the only companies that build quality control stations for catalytic converters. Basically what they wanted me to do was take some of the work away from one of their engineers that was needed to focus more time on other things. I got a tour of their small offices and got to look at the products that they design. After the tour, I recieved a thorough interview about my experiences with electronics and software. The interviewer asked lots of questions about what I would do to troubleshoot a windows computer in various scenarios, which I answered easily. Then he quized me on my electrical engineering knowledge, which is very limited. Overall I thought that the interview went as well as it could. I answered what I knew, but I have some gaping holes in my knowledge that have yet to be filled by taking higher level electrical engineering classes. I think that the company would be better off hiring someone with more technical knowledge than me so I am not going to hold my breath.

Since my desktop broke, I have been more productive. I started to get my mini-sumo robot up and running again but I ran into road blocks due to linux. I believe that I can write programs to the robot, but they don’t seem to do anything. I don’t know if it is a problem in the code, the compiling process or the upload process. Oh well. I will definitely be able to figure it out when I get the parts in for my destop tomorrow and get windows up.

2 weeks ago it was cold and snowing here in Montana, now it is sunny and beautiful. I need to find someone to go backpacking with that has a car. I stayed up kind of late last night finishing up and electical engineering pre-lab. When I finally finished, I set my alarm for 7am and went to sleep. I woke up today at noon. Either my alarm did not go off or I woke up, turned the alarm off and went back to sleep, forgetting everything. Since my physics lab was canceled, I managed to sleep through all my classes! The day has been much less stressful without having to worry about classes.

My main computer died last friday. I was minding my own business when windows froze. I waited several minutes until I did a hard restart. My computer restarted with nasty message saying that an important file was corrupted, check my hardware or contact my system administrator. Since I am my own system administrator, I did a few checks and came to the conclusion that my hard drive is corrupted.

On a friend’s computer I was able to browse through the files, but every once in a while, windows would give a drive I/O error. So now I am waiting until replacement hard drives arrive from newegg.com. Some of my data was backed up, but I decided that I don’t want it to happen again, so I got 2 hard drives to put in raid 1.

These events prompted me to backup my main laptop which runs linux. I keep all my email and lots of programs that I have written on that laptop. So I set up my secondary laptop as a backup machine. I have a cron job that backs up my entire home directory on my main laptop every day at 5am. Once I get my raid running on my main computer, I will be completely backed up for the first time ever.

So I went to see the DARPA Grand Challenge. I was able to talk with 6 or 7 of the teams and see their robots. One of the amazing things that I noticed was the simplicity of the robots. Most of the robots were modified off-road vehicles that had mechanical controls of the brake, gas and steering wheel. Then they had a couple of sensors in front, and a couple of really fast computers in the rear seat. Another point that stood out was the lack of stereo vision. I had thought that every team would have some kind of array of cameras set up so that they could do image processing and get range data. I only saw 2 teams with stereo cameras set up and one of those was a commercially availiable solution. The other teams I talked with said that they had tried it and were unable to get good results. Every team I saw was using 2D SICK Lidar sensors. I was kind of hoping that more teams would be using stereo vision, and would open up their source code. It is relatively inexpensive to get 2 webcams to do stereo vision, but lidar sensors cost ~4 grand each. While the completion of this race showed great advances in autonomous vehicles, there is still lots of work to be done.

All nighters are fun! I decided that my sleep schedule is way off, going to be at 3am makes it hard to stay awake all day long. The easiest way to remedy the problem is to stay up all night, then get to bed early the next night. So 5 cans of Coke later, here I am. I spent the night working on differential equations and getting ready for my trip to Las Vegas. I had better do well on the differential equations test I have tomorrow. Pretty soon the cafeteria will open and I will be able to go get some coffee to get me through the day.

I was reading the some previous entries on my site, and I realized that it was really hard to read. So I stole some css from Ryan to make it look better. Sigh… enough procrastinating, I should get back to differential equations.

I can’t name anything interesting that I have done in the last couple of weeks. Taking 19 credits does not leave a whole lot of time for extracurricular activities. On the average weekday, I do between 3-4 hours of homework. Between the homework and the 3-6 hours of class each day, I have virtually no social life. I suppose that is what it means to be an engineer. I have been considering switching majors to Computer Science so that I can drop differential equations, but I am not giving up yet. Another option is if I decide to double major in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, I could take differential equations again next semester along with another math class, an electrical engineering class and a couple computer science classes. I will have to see how differential equations goes.

This Thursday afternoon I am going to take the bus to Las Vegas to see the DARPA Grand Challenge. I am going to meet most of the people that I did the Nasa Robotics Internship Program with. The bus trip takes almost an entire day each way, so I will be missing school on Friday and Monday. It should be lots of fun.