Sunday, August 21, 2011

Remember To Do Some Good.

It was probably Saturday morning 4:00 A.M. the week of when I was taking one last look at my inbox out of shear bored-i-ness. I remember getting the e-mail from Jean about volunteering for another robotics camp, and that I had forwarded the information to some of my colleagues and friends. No responds from either group..

4:15 AM
There wasn't anything on my agenda for the upcoming week, not in the mornings anyways. I just had to meet with a potential employer on Monday. I told myself I would go only if I could get another friend to come, but after waiting for several days with no reply, I thought about just sending a courtesy response in case they were hopeful about having extra volunteers. I wasn't going to do it.

4:25 AM
One Piece on Hulu.com. Amazing anime. It was probably on the war with Whitebeard saga that I was on.

4:45 AM
I was getting sleepy and tired. Only my fellow night owls were active on facebook. Not less than 24 hours ago, I had returned from a bicycle trip from Lake Mead. My body was still recovering from the sun and 45+ mile ride. Still in front of the desktop, I looked down at my hands to read a that message written down on my keyboard.
I guess putting it there did it's purpose. Reading something is all the motivation you need sometimes.

4:51 A.M.
The e-mail was sent, and that was it. 
==========================================================

The event was a girl scout robotics camp. Apparently it was my 2nd time doing it. Or not - a year or less ago they told me, I had done the same thing. It was called something different back then and was less formal. Throughout the week I was there, I got to meet and re-meet some interesting people. Among them Ms. Gari Lindsey, the current VP of the LVV section of SWE; Josh Mauro, who I discovered was also a mechanical engineering undergrad at UNLV; and Monica LeFebvre, a lady who helped coordinate programs with the girl scout group. They're shown in the following photo.
Everyone was so serious. Notice the serious face in the foreground. Such seriousness.

Josh kept getting hassled by the younger girls. They loved us, maybe a little too much. I was quickly reminded of old times with my baby sister after seeing them jump him and fight for his attention. This was the reason why I stayed away from the younger girls. There were around 35 girl scouts working on a series of tasks. By age range, they were divided into two groups. 

Most of my time was spent offering advice on the NXT Lego Mindstorm kits assigned to the older girls. The most challenging task they were assigned to including using a 3rd motor to control an arm that picked up objects located on a mat and placed them at another location. All of them wanted to used pre-routed programs. My IEEE friends would've panicked >.<

On Friday, came judgement day. Kim Womack came by to judge one of the events, and I was assigned to aid. My performance as a judge was less than that of an educator. I believe the main goal of it would be to perform a professional evaluation on a list of required task in order to showcase to the parents what the girls have learned. She was indeed a professional.

At the end of the day, there was a pizza party and Josh and I were handed this.
I was appreciated and have the certificate to prove it.
We  received "Thanks-A-Lot" cookies by the girl scouts. By the way, if you haven't tasted them, they are delicious! If memory serves right, the chocolate fudge has a sort of minty taste to it which makes these cookies unique. The accompanying mug was unexpected as well. Aside from the material stuff, earlier in the week an 11 year old girl scout had said "Thank You" to me and smiled. The first of many thanks received. All the rest actually had diluted the value of the phrase, but that first one had made my day. It was totally worth volunteering my time throughout the week. These young ladies will grow up and build weapons of war one day. And cure cancer. They'll also cure cancer. With robots*

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Wall-A's "Arm" and V_o

Greetings world!

For at least one person, it'll be obvious why I've posted this. Several months back I began working on a project involving an ATMEL based micro-controller, some servos, and a few sensors. The goal of the project was to experiment with different differential-drive algorithms, and to gain experience with the spiffy soldering iron I 'burrowed' from my step-dad. Originally, the project ran on a homemade augmented micro-controller, but later moved onto an Axon II because I was a noob and the thing had more documentation than the relic tomes ATMEL offered.

The baby I brought into the world was given the name of "Wall-A." She is a 2 wheel differential drive critter with an ultra-sonic sensor, and 2 homemade light sensors made out of cheap cadmium sulfide (CdS) photoresistors that are cheaply available from the Shack. I'll be giving a brief overview of the schematics involved with the photoresistor set up.

First off, this is a CdS photoresistor.
In absolute darkness, you can consider it to be in the off position. The voltage potential running through the leads would be 0. If photons from light hit the surface of this circuit element the pathway for current running through the leads is opened. Effectively, higher levels of frequencies correlate to a decrease in the resistance this pathway offers. In the photo below you can see me holding a photoresistor connected to a multimeter and pointing it towards a lamp.

In order to make a useful application of this for data logging, it's best to take advantage of something known as the voltage divider rule. The standard equation governing this circuit is set to calculate what the out voltage is.
(eq1.1) v_o = R*v_i/(R+R_p), where v_o = voltage that gets read by the micro-controller, R = resistance provided by a static resistor, v_i = voltage coming in, R_p = the variable resistance provided by the photoresistor which is correlated to the intensity of the light hitting the circuit element. It is R_p which we are trying to solve for. The schematic and soldered circuit looks like this.

The voltage across each resistor in a series circuit divides in direct proportion to the individual series resistances. Thus, you can always determine the proportion in which voltage drops are distributed around a circuit. Since we are solving for R_p, eq1.1 rearranges to
(eq1.2) R_p = ((R*v_i)/v_o) - R

Again, R_p correlates to the intensity of the photons hitting the surface of the photoresistor. In plain English, it gives you a calculated value based of an analog reading from the circuit. Ahh.. It would tell you how dark or not dark it is outside.

So this is how you would create your very own light sensor. Typically they sell for ~$5 on the market, but if you have the materials at hand, you can make your own in as little as a couple minutes. These sensors are currently being used on the Wall-A prototype to help the little guy stay hidden in the darkness. He is a photophobe you see.


Yes, that is a 2x4, duck tape, and cardboard you see. Wall-A is an incredible advanced high-tech prototype and will be doing stuff like curing cancer, or harassing neighborhood cats one day.



















Monday, April 11, 2011

Busy Monday

I've never had a busier Monday. Mentor meeting, 330 exam, SWE stuff,e-mails, bio lab, library study, and walking around all over campus.. Today will be a busy week, especially since we're hosting a SPDC conference this weekend. Come to think of it, I was even at school on Sunday. And, in the chaos of it all, I saved a life.

Two actually. She was pregnant.




I made arrangements a week ago to take my bio lab Monday instead of Friday since I'd have obligations to attend to. My lab partner and I were conducting sinister experiments on life. We tortured and nearly froze a crayfish to the point where it gave up trying to 'right' itself up. It gave up on life.. And then we boiled a pregnant mother. All in the name of science. We were Nazis. Seriously, I've been through the books. Nazi scientists would put prisoners in ice pools to register their physiological responses. It was the same thing we did today on a legally defenseless cray fish.

The mother, She came from the species known as daphnia. The picture above was taken by a htc 3.2 MP camera shot through the lens of a dissecting microscope. What you can't see from the picture is a blue figure near the bottom curve of her spine. Attached to her brood pouch was a little mini version of herself with a little black dot on it. It moved inside her as she did, and you could even make out the underdeveloped thoracic appendages wiggle. There was a tiny blue heart in there as well. Beat.. beat.. beat..

Our job was to record the beats per minute made by her heart. My lab partner got a base number under room temperature. Next was a beat number under saturated water. We didn't know.. The boiling drop of water that came from the pipette was already around her by the time we noticed she wasn't alone in there. Her heart's beats per minute did increase though, from 160 bpm to 180 bpm average. We didn't record data on her child's heart though.. darn.

So yeah, instead of throwing her down the sink where she would've faced certain death for her child, I took out the pipette again and located her from where she came from, a fish tank full of a 100 more daphnia. Forget about the fact that we purposefully boiled her and the fact that their existence take up less than (1/10)^3 mm in volume. I am a hero to an unborn daphnia.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Pros and Cons on Some Companies

The principal of self respect pivots around the definition of acknowledging one's self.

That last line has nothing to do with the rest of this blog, except that it was saved as a draft and written during an attempt at trying to be poetic while in a bus ride at 1:30 in the morning. Stupid modified bus schedule.. I was waiting for that thing for about 40 minutes until it finally decided to show up.

There's a stolen bottle of Chipotle pepper sauce and that some lousy civils left for me on a desk sitting in front of me. I in turn decided not to throw it away, but instead kept it for it's useful qualities. It looks good sitting by my desktop next to my monitor. The item makes my room feel more Hispanic-like. They have good burritos I must say. It's a weekend, and now it's my turn to get sick. Although, I'm not very sick to say the least. It's just that my body got slightly feverish and my nose began running. I blame it on the windy weather I've been enjoying too much. Oh, and my lab partner Dianne.. I blame her somehow. That or Roberto's. Some advice, DON'T eat from the salad bar during late hours. Those foods have been drying in the air for so long, and since it's night time, don't expect much of it to be fresh. I've obtained the stomach flu once because of this. Not that Roberto's was proven to be the culprit, but the timing of the food consumption lines up.

My crap still hasn't come from robotshop.com. I ordered several servos and an infrared range finder back in early December and now it's almost March.. I'm giving them a really bad review on their back order policy, starting with this blog. DON'T buy an item from robotshop.com if it says it's on back order. They say it's x amount of weeks on average for them to get in a new order, but in my specific case, it's been almost a quarter of year for the sensor to come in. There are disadvantages to buying from reseller stores. The tracker number tells me my shipment reached Las Vegas a little over a day ago. It's Sunday today, government services don't deliver.. I think this is why UPS and FEDEX will always have the advantage.

So this Thursday I'm heading to Palms Spring for a SWE conference. Should be interesting. What I really like about it, is that we (the UNLV-SWE team) got it to be free. Thanks to a company known as UP (not UPS, but UP), a good amount of money was designated for SWE B074. We're now able to pay for hotel rooms, car rentals (they [UNLV] forced us to rent cars due to insurance purposes..), registration, and 1 tour for ~10 of our members). It's nice to be supported by industry. But seriously, it would have been cheaper without the rented vans. I'm starting to think that it's conventions that keep the car rental business in business. I'm sure they have lobbyists shaking hands with insurance lawyers to keep certain car rental/insurance laws in place or something.

So I bought a dietary supplement from Walgreens called "Wal-Born Plus". It's a generic brand set up to compete against Air Guard. The supplementary facts are the same, and not only was the pricing cheaper, but since they weren't selling well, Walgreens placed them on a 2 for 1 'special'. I bought two. Good stuff, but it doesn't taste much like orange.

Monday, February 14, 2011

The Day After Valentines

So, for a fundraiser SWE sold roses to raise funds for pizza and stuff during the week of and prior to Valentines. It was okay. With every fake rose we made, each heart shaped cut made from paper, each green tape wrapped around a stick, I knew someone would smile at the sight of our designs. The rose,card, candy combo sold better in the engineering hall actually. They didn't sell so well in the Student Union. The place was packed with frat boys and at the same time we were competing with other vendors of valentine paraphernalia. But concerning frat boys, I don't like their kind much because: 1: they didn't react to the amazing puns I placed onto the cards, and 2: a couple of them stole my reserved table when I first arrived at MSU. Also, I don't think frat boys are very educated. There's just something about this side of campus that lacks the sort of intellectualism that the north end holds. Maybe this is because it's like comparing a science student to a student in business. In fact, it was exactly that. Needless to say, our cards sold VERY well in the engineering hall.

In the days proceeding the aforementioned fundraiser, we were making these cards. A dedicated team of card makers and I worked many hours like unpaid Christmas elves slaving over the creation of a product we believed would make the world happier.. At least for a day. The working conditions were, dangerous. Paper cuts were made, people ran with scissors in their hands, and glitter attacked every piece of body part it could get its hands on. Glitter has hands by the way* Some of us needed to take supplies home with us so we could finish up the quotas we had set up for ourselves. On one particular night, my mother walks in on me in a room literally littered with hundreds of hearts and me covered in glitter. She slowly walked away backwards closing the door, questioning my masculinity. (It's not what it looks like! [echo effect])

Sunday, February 6, 2011

When u come from nothing, anything is something

I discovered this photo last week inside the Arts Factory.

http://artfulwv.com/event.php?event_id=11

The phrase read, "When u come from nothing, anything is something." I stared at it for about a minute until I began to realize how well it reflected on not only mine, but the lives of others.

In a way, I ended up here by chance. The house I lived in as a toddler was one by to a dumpster site. The house I had my first memories in, didn't even have running water. I recall my mother taking me with her to form lines at a neighbor's house who had installed running water. She was a school teacher, who was working on a 4 year degree in college. My mother was an intelligent women, who graduated with the 2nd highest gpa in her school. And.. then she became a school teacher.. Which is okay I guess. But one day, I remember she had hired workers to come by our one-room house and install a pipeline. The day came, when people were lining up in our front door, with buckets, requesting water for their families. I remember some of them had kids about my size. My mother, her name is Elizabeth, had improved her quality of life.

Back in Peru, in that community we onced lived in, my first pet was a hamster, who eventually died because I over fed him or something. The night we went to discard him into the nearby dumpster, there was a llama herder walking by. It was a magnificent sight, not really relevant to this story, but just something to mention simply because. There was electricity, I recall watching Dinosaurs and The Simpsons in the tv we had. These were the first television shows I experienced. But ya, lived near a dumpster, no garbage collection, became one of the few houses in the block with running water. My mother was a Queen, in our little world.

I didn't even know I had a dad, until I came to America. They basically told me, "this is a dad, this one is yours, now do the child-dad thing." We came to America, and no, we didn't dig tunnels, or design a boat to get here illegally. I was a political refugee. These were the days of the Peruvian Communists. The days where the police murdered it's own citizens in order stop the spread of an ideology they didn't agree with. Communities attacked other communities, but we still continued to live where we did. My mother told me stories of how bad the police state had gotten at some points. Once when my grand-dad got sick, she and my grandma needed to reach a public telephone at night. You couldn't leave the house after a certain time, or the military would shot you on sight unless you waved a white flag that you needed to carry with you at all times. Then they would approach you with guns drawn at you to check if you were a communist.

And then one day, the communists came to Lima. The group was known as the Shining Path. Anyone who associated with them, or in any way helped them was considered an enemy in the eyes of the law. They began sending truck bombs to hospitals, killing hundreds, and in one instance thousands. Everyone was trying to kill everyone. We were all destined to become collateral damage in the eyes of two (and 3) forces opposing one another. The population was to become simply a number, to justify governance of a particular kind. My mother worked at a hospital. I guess at one point, it wasn't difficult to get that visa. She took the opportunity and we fled.

So I arrive at Texas, a child, only 3 or 4. Later we flew to Las Vegas, Nevada. Life continued, a different world, a different culture, a different lifestyle. I rode buses before, but the trip from McCarran Airport to Sonny's Saloon was the first time I recall riding in a car on a highway. The feeling of going over 55mph was unusual, and it was as if my body wanted to keep going forward every time it stopped (inertia). It was quite noticeable, but in time it became a regular usual experience that one wouldn't think much about. We arrived at Sonny's Saloon that night, and dined. Best cup of green tea ever.

Daddy was a conservative, believing a women's place was in the kitchen, and all of that other culturally stuff one could expect to be a connotation of a Hispanic background. Mom, got a job working at the MGM doing the room cleaning gig. She met a few good friends, and was introduced to an American culture where things like divorce and women's right where commonplace. Daddy was a bastard, and even though he looked out for his family and protected my mother, he went on to beat her, did stuff, etc. However; my mother wasn't some passive bitch who would take that from a man. She divorced him, got full child custody (me!), and did the single mother thing (like how she pulled it off in our past life back in Peru). If she could survive a police state, raise a child on her own, work at a hospital to get bills paid, and work on a 4 year college degree (she was like a semester away from finishing) while still putting herself ahead of the curve within a community lacking running water, she could do the same in the United States without a dead weight man keeping her in place. Ya, my mom's amazing.

Today, mother's remarried, 2 story house, computer in every living room, t.v. in every room (living or not), a mini garden in the back, cars, a couple of them.. And people aren't trying to blow up our work place. Oh, and her son's going to college. It's better, I guess. Similar things could have occurred in Peru though, if we haven't left, or died. Apparently I have a cousin who's a heart surgeon, and another who's a computer engineer. Oh, and I have two aunts that are retailers doing 'international' business thing with firms in China. I'm sure they're all doing well, wherever they might be. It's just interesting to think of where your roots originate from. I mean, I guess I could have also been an engineer in Peru and maybe worn a different coat, if things had gone differently. But, I'm not. I was wearing an undergraduate's coat. A black, warm, and lovely coat.

So, last week, when I looked at the aforementioned photo, all of this came to mind. And in a minute, I realized, "this artist made a point tonight."

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Motivation or Lack Thereof

How does a person manage to waste 64 hours of his time doing nothing except blink at a screen? Productivity is something to value for. I start feeling guilty when I'm not productive, but oftentimes guilt isn't enough of a motivator to get something done. Oftentimes, it's that adrenaline rush you get when you're racing for something. When you know you're going up against the rest of the world, or when you know there's there's excitement to be had when a certain stage gets reached.

I recall a particular instances about about two months ago, when I was banging my head on my keyboard whining about a rounding algorithm I needed to write. My procedural logic didn't want to work properly on screen @_@! The fact that it was due later that week, and that I knew there wouldn't be enough time to finish it later was also a motivator. It was a race to beat the I'm-about-to-fall-asleep clock. Finally, I simply laid on my bed with my eyes closed and tried to run through the sequence with my eyes shut. It works - having a mental display of the algorithm you're trying to program. But what if you're not in a race? What if you know you have a year long time table. There's no adrenaline, and thus the excitement that comes along with it ceases to exist during a long-time endure. Beyond that, perhaps an adequate motivator would be what some call, the "purpose" motivator.

Last a week a couple pals and I spent three hours inside a Del Taco talking about a variety of crazy stuff. Something we went over was the motivator factor. It seems that some physiologists ran a few incentive experiments to try and determine a way to maximize work productivity within a team. They offered a monetary incentive to some test subjects and told them to do a simple physical task. The results were as expected. They did the same thing another time, but instead this time, the task was something that required innovation and a sense of creativity. The outcome was not as expected.

The end results of these experiments were that the monetary incentive modeled worked for grunt related work, where the solution is obvious. However, when people are already making enough to sustain themselves and the task required to do required ingenuity such a model ceases to be valid. The reason was, "purpose". People who agree with the purpose in something, do much better at it.

Take open source software for example. People contribute to something, without getting paid for it. Or take, Wikipedia as another. People contribute information to it without getting paid for it. I believe people go about contributing for these sorts of projects because they see some sort of purpose in it, even if it isn't direct. A purpose can also be a benefit, and a benefit can also be self-improvement. Notice how I'm broadening these definitions here.

A lot of the inspiration for this thought process here comes from a TED speech I came across. View this. Dan Pink kicks ass. So as you'll be able to see soon, this thought process has been around for quite a while. But in recent history you'll you might be surprised to know that it also has a business application to team management. Google and FaceBook take this sort of approach to generate innovation within their ranks. Employees with space are happy employees. A lot of the nice apps offered be either of those companies are direct products of this.

It's interesting stuff.