Tim’s Blog

I have been really busy the last couple of weeks. As soon as I got back from Spring Break, all my teachers decided to rob me of sleep.

My engineering design class really sucks. The idea of it is good, but the execution is off. The entire class revolves around a group project made up of students from different engineering backgrounds. My group consists of an industrial engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer and me. The point of the class is for us to pick a project that we can all contribute to, and then learn about how to be a part of an effective multidisciplinary team. The project that we picked is making a hand-held wind-powered generator for small electronic devices. It has been fun working on the project even though I highly doubt it will actually work. The problem with the class is the lectures. The professor talks at us about how to do things like “List and define the main elements of a complete problem definition, and describe the key activities to develop a good problem definition.” I mean, come on. Who cares?

My real time microcontroller applications class is a lot of fun, but still a lot of work. Every week we have 4 hours of scheduled lab, and about 4 additional hours of unscheduled lab. The last project that we did involved inputting the current time from a keypad, writing it to a real time clock over I2C, and updating an LCD with the time from the real time clock. I really like the class because the assignments we do are not at all pointless. Every thing I have done in that class has been both fun and educational!

Circuits II is a lot of work and not very easy. Every week we have to cram 3 hours of lab work into a 2 hour lab session. Then spend 4-5 hours writing the lab report. That’s not including homework which is due 3 times a week. I decided that I hate analog electronics. I prefer digital, as my digital logic professor says “the only answers are 0, 1, or 2^n.”

Digital logic is pretty easy. We are programming FPGAs using VHDL. VHDL is a hardware description language that is fairly intuitive once you get the hang of it. We implement simple state machines that make LEDs blink and such.

Social dance is always the highlight of my day (2 days a week). There is never any homework, and I don’t have to think. Also I get to interact with lots of girls, some of whom are pretty cute.

I am about ready to get out of here. I have been looking at robotics companies, some of them look like a lot of fun to work at.

1 more year.

Wii Remote Projects

I saw this on the internet and decided I needed to buy a “Wiimote” (a controller for the Nintendo Wii). I started at the top of the page and went down. Each video described a more awesome thing than the one before it. I want to play around with it and get the IR camera working as a mouse under Linux. Currently I don’t have any time for personal projects, so we’ll see what happens.

Last weekend my sisters came and visited me. We had a good time (or at least I did) seeing the sites of Bozeman. We went on a hike, went to the Museum of the Rockies, toured campus, tried to go rock climbing and made some good food.

So far this week I have spent an average of 6 hours a day in lab. I have 3 classes with labs this semester: Circuits II (EE207), Logic Design (EE367) and Real-time Microcontroller Applications (EE465). This week has been especially bad for my microcontrollers class. I have spent about 4 hours every day this week programming assembly in the digital lab. We had a big project due today, and the next project is due a week from today. It never ends.

After 752 lines of code, my partner and I managed to write a program in Lisp that plays the game of gomoku. It took several almost-all-nighters to get the job done, but now we have a working program. In the class-wide gomoku tournament today, we won the first 2 games, then lost our third. In our third game our opponents beat us in 22 moves when we went first, and we beat them in 34 moves when they went first. Unfortunately since they won in less moves, they win. Here is the source code, if anyone is interested.

No Shave November is going pretty good. I have a beard with only a couple of bare patches. John is winning with the best looking facial hair. Luke and I are pretty even. No pictures yet, I’ll post some at the end of week after it’s all done.

I got back from a good Thanksgiving with my family. It was pretty much the same thing as the last couple of Thanksgivings. I suppose that’s the point of tradition. We went to my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Seattle and had a feast. Then we went to Whidbey Island for a short visit.

Less than 2 weeks of class left, then a week of finals. In that time I have to write a program in Lisp to solve gomoku for my Artificial Intelligence class. Everyone in the class is writing one, then we are having a class tournament. I have read a couple of papers on the subject and I hope to be able to write a winning program.