Baby Don't Hertz Me

The arrival of fourth year for many engineering students at my university is either loved or loathed. Senior design is a large project that all engineering students must complete to graduate. The scale of the project is one that will be larger than any previously done for academic purposes. My group and I have a rather lofty project idea. We are going to design and hopefully build a CubeSat. What is a CubeSat? A CubeSat is like almost any other satellite simply much smaller. The size of typical satellites can be anywhere from a dog all the way up to a car or bigger. CubeSat sizes go the opposite direction. The sizes of CubeSat are referred to as 'U'. 1U is a 10x10x10 cm size satellite while a 2U would be simply two 1U stacked making 20x10x10 cm. Our target as of right now is to design a 2U CubeSat. The potential scope of the project is enormous and since time is limited we may not be able to complete and entire CubeSat. This being said, we are going to try our best! It...

Several weeks ago, the professor who is supervising me for the summer and I were talking about technology. This is to be expected since he is an ECE professor and I am an ECE student. It started as a run of the mill conversation until we somehow managed to get on the topic of why my supervisor always needed to have an RSS feed on his mobile devices. He insisted on the RSS feed to have easy access to Slashdot. When my supervisor first mentioned Slashdot I wondered what it was. A quick google search and some reading showed that it is the eloquent sibling of Reddit. Not to bash Reddit too hard but it can sometimes be hard to wade through the heaping pile of garbage that can be collect in a Reddit thread. There isn't an up/down-voting system but the content is definitely of a higher quality than Reddit. You can usually tell a post is of a higher quality by the number of comments. The comment counter takes the visual place of the up-vote counter on Reddit. Slashdot may have a g...

As the ranks of embedded system developers swell with the hobbyists and amateurs, the question of simplicity versus precision is coming up more regularly. Should we learn to use Arduino? Should we learn to use ARM? My simple answer would be learn both but as with most technological dilemmas the answer is never that simple. In my education I have been forced to use an ARM based micro-controller. Being tossed into a complex development environment was really great for me as a developer. I have always been enchanted by embedded systems and this experience allowed me to sink my teeth into a design problem. Designing a hardware and software solution in one clean package is satisfying. Before beginning this comparison I would like to say that I am not looking at advanced tools for ARM like NXP's Processor Expert or other tools that simplify the design process. We will be comparing unassisted development of Arduino vs ARM. Simplicity Arduino UNO, one of the more commonly ...

Despite usually being an auditory experience music can also come with an equally wonderful visual experience. With everybody and their dog trying to make it big on YouTube there has been a massive emergence of beautiful music videos. There are some fantastic live-action videos but for this list I am looking at animated videos only. I even decided to save you all the convenience of having to search for the videos or going link by link and made a YouTube playlist. IF you do want to thank my just comment your favourite video. You can find the playlist here . I will also link the titles of the videos to their respective clips. 10. She Wants Me Dead by Cazzette This song makes it on the list but just barely. I like the song and the music video is pretty good. I remember some kids shows I used to watch having a similar art-style.  9.  Jenny by Studio Killers This is the song I found to discover the Studio Killers. I like some of their other songs but this one ha...

No time to blog (I am in blue). I shall start by apologizing for vanishing from the face of the earth (or at least my blog) for three consecutive weeks. One of my favorite hobbies is judo, an Olympic grappling sport that originates from Japan. I have been competing for many years and was given a spot on the Francophone Games Team. Ironically I am an anglophone attending the Francophone Games. This being said I am bilingual (english and french) so I am at least able to communicate with the locals while I am there. It was my best international result so far which has me excited but I am still sad that I didn't medal. I went 3-2 for bronze and only lost to other Canadians who are going to senior worlds in a few weeks. From a technological perspective the Ivory Coast is an interesting topic. Africa has tended to lag far behind in technology which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The lag has allowed for some rapid jumps to newer technology. At least in the city I was in (Abid...

This past week at work I finally had a reason to sit down and start learning how to use Git. So far this summer I have written large amounts of code for a control system which will be used to perform antenna and RF testing. One of my room mates (and coworker) is currently working on a massive software project which is really cool. I don't want to talk to much about it since it is a work in progress but he suggested I start using git for version control. I was hesitant at first since my system for version control wasn't too bad. BUT I don't regret learning to use git. Hopefully I can have my him talk about his software project in the coming weeks. Upon starting using GitHub to host my repository I decided to take a look around and see what I could find for interesting software. So I decided to compile a list of my top few repositories currently available. Passwords for the Manly Man Creating passwords can be hard. Creating secure passwords can be even more diff...

Some people last week were messaging me about what IDE and setup I was using for programming Python and so I thought I would discuss what I have been doing.  Python may be really easy to learn but it can be very tricky to configure everything properly. The vanilla installation Python is pretty simple to use. You can simply write a text file and run it from a terminal. Sadly things start to get a little hairy when you are trying to use many different libraries and can't easily get them installed. You can try installing and managing all packages manually but why not let the work be offloaded to a great piece of software. Enter Anaconda. I discovered Anaconda completely by accident. I was going to manage libraries by myself but after struggling to install all the required software I saw mention of it on a forum. Rarely am I this pleased on an impulse install. Anaconda allowed me to have complete control over my Python and library versions and allowed me to quickly switch b...