Social Network for Two
November 11th, 2007
It's kind of funny how everything just seems to be connected for a reason. View full screen, Social Network for Two, courtesy blip.tv.
Polytechnic University: FPGA Hardware Design Challenge
November 9th, 2007
FPGA's will play an integral part in our everyday lives. Today, they already perform super high-speed large scale gravitational physics calculations every nanosecond. As well as, connect your cell phones to radio towers and satellites. What better way to learn what they are also useful for in a short period of time.
"The participants of this challenge will implement the MICKEY-128 stream cipher in hardware. Each student is expected to develop a working implementation of the MICKEY-128 stream cipher in VHDL (Hardware Description Language). This will involve: understanding the stream cipher and how it is implemented, designing it in hardware (VHDL), testing it for functionality, and synthesizing it on an FPGA.
By the end of the challenge, the student should have a VHDL module that he/she can load onto an FPGA to verify correct operation."
Submission is due by midnight, November 25th.
More information here: Hardware Design Competition
Strange Attractor 07
November 8th, 2007
Strange Attractor 07
Beautiful AIR app rendering originally uploaded and created by the legendary BIT-101.
Beautiful AIR app rendering originally uploaded and created by the legendary BIT-101.
Note to self: Attractor
The Companion Cube
November 8th, 2007
Very Soon to be Reality…
Making the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007
November 4th, 2007
This past weekend I attended the DARPA Urban Challenge in Victorsville, CA along with three other RIT Robotics Club members. I am still collecting all the information, conversations, and pictures from the event.
Somewhere, I have a couple pictures of two of the Mythbusters. Unfortunately, they were too busy to take a picture with us but did a phenomenal job commentating the competition.
Check out my flickr slideshow for more pictures from the event.
Visualizing the Evolution of a Social Network via Google Analytics
October 29th, 2007
I recently read an article on embedded.com that certain keywords can be analyzed for popularity. You can search the world's countries in terms of different search keyword rankings. I decided to read the Google Analytics results of one of the sites programmed with a few friends.
Visualizing the Evolutionary Growth of Social Networking Websites
October 12th, 2007
Here, I venture down a completely unknown path with Flash CS3 & so-far amazingly easy to work with ActionScript 3.0.
What is Evolutionary Electronics?
August 6th, 2007
One day I was walking around the RIT library and spotted a book out of the corner of my eye. Virtual Organisms, I thought neat, I opened to a random page and started reading…
"But Thompson has done the seemingly impossible. Or rather evolution has. It has produced a working tone discriminator that uses only thirty-two cells and Thompson has no idea how it works."
(Under Reconstruction) The Start of a Robot Swarm
October 3rd, 2006
We stayed up all night to get the Robotic's Club's "Microcontroller Workshop" ready for an amazing bunch of students interested in learning about programmable microcontrollers. They went from learning what a microcontroller does to a fully operational robot that is capable of simple object avoidance. I have included below pictures of the robots, parts guide, datasheets, and source code. Don't be afraid of datasheets, they have mountains of information, you just have to spend the time to read them. Best of all, we built five robots each coming to about $34 dollars each! Read the rest of this entry »
NXP Philips/ARM7 LPC2148 Microcontroller
October 2nd, 2006
A majority of the features offered by this device would be greatly beneficial on a small robot or as part of your next USB/SD computerized project. More details after the break.
"The NXP (founded by Philips) LPC2148 is an ARM7TDMI-S based high-performance 32-bit RISC Microcontroller with Thumb extensions 512KB on-chip Flash ROM with In-System Programming (ISP) and In-Application Programming (IAP), 32KB RAM, Vectored Interrupt Controller, Two 10bit ADCs with 14 channels, USB 2.0 Full Speed Device Controller, Two UARTs, one with full modem interface. Two I2C serial interfaces, Two SPI serial interfaces Two 32-bit timers, Watchdog Timer, PWM unit, Real Time Clock with optional battery backup, Brown out detect circuit General purpose I/O pins. CPU clock up to 60 MHz, On-chip crystal oscillator and On-chip PLL." - KEIL, an ARM company