First Posting

Hello World!

This is a welcome post for me as I start what I hope to be a relatively consistent blog. I plan on using this to keep friends and family abreast of the things I'm up to (as well as reminding myself of what I've been doing).

So...what I've been up to: designing a processor, designing a remote control light sensing/dimming system, and designing a device that allows a person to control a TV via SMS. In a nutshell, I've been keeping myself busy.

The processor has been a semester-long project for my ECE 152 class. We built all of the key components separately and now it's time to pull everything together. We haven't gotten it to successfully run yet, but I'm hoping that we're close and its just some minor tweaks.

The remote control light sensing/dimming system is for ECE 51. The class is all about circuit design and we're not allowed to use microcontrollers, which makes things more challenging. Instead of having a small brain that we can give instructions, we need to build a circuit that will respond to input and generate the correct output. I think we've made good progress on that front as well. We did a lot of circuit work in lab yesterday that should save us time in the long run. Actually, if it's correct, then we just need to build and troubleshoot.

Finally, the device that allows a person to control a TV via SMS. My independent study. The idea for this is that people sitting in a public space can use their phone to vote for channels. I have a whitepaper that I'll upload soon (haha...wonder if I'll remember). This one has been interesting because there's a bit less oversight with an independent study. On the flip side, there's more motivation since I volunteered (and helped turn a desire into a design).

The big challenge has been getting the Arduino Microcontroller to speak to the Matchport WiFi device via serial. Luckily, Lantronix (the manufacturers of the Matchport) has been very helpful. Today, we made some progress in understanding how serial works and how the devices should be communicating. Once we get the devices talking, we'll be over the big hill. Then its just a matter of grabbing some data from a regular computer that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

So, as you can see from all the verbiage above, I've been keeping myself busy. I wouldn't have it any other way though. I love what I'm doing here. As a footnote of sorts, I also had a successful meeting with study abroad today, so the path to Israel for Spring 2009 is finally crystallizing. And now, I'm going to relax before tackling these projects again over the weekend.

First post-ly,
Alex

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