Video Games Live and the City!

So this past Saturday, I went on a trip with Tom Bigelow, Diana and her brother Danny. First stop was Newark, NJ and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to see the 2pm showing of Video Games Live which was excellent. We took the LIRR to NYC-Penn Station, then transferred from there to NJ Transit to Newark, finally taking the Newark Light Rail to the concert hall. The Center is a lot nicer than we expected and the concert was amazing. During their traditional onstage Guitar Hero contest, the contestant surprised everyone by requesting the difficulty be turned all the way up to expert, and he still cleared the required 180,000 points with a wide margin. A double encore with music from Castlevania and Final Fantasy 7 wrapped up the show nicely. We took the Light Rail back to Newark-Penn and then took the train back to NYC-Penn, and then we went exploring. First we walked down through Times Square and made a stop in Toys'R'Us, which was quite awesome, then we went down to Rockefeller Center to see the tree and explore the area around it. We also stopped in to St. Patrick's to take photos, and made a swing by Bryant Park on the way back to the station. We just caught the 9:16 PM train back to Long Island to end our long day. Lots of fun and of course we took pictures, and they're all available here.

The take

Well the rubble from Christmas morning has been cleared away, so I thought I'd take a few minutes and write about the gifts I recieved. Here we go:

• Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
• Sphere by Michael Crichton
• Maxtor One Touch 500GB External HD, USB
• Sony MDR-NC40 Noise Canceling Headphones
• A 12-cup coffee machine!
• A nice Nalgene bottle for school.
• A new pair of slippers
• $50 American Express Gift Card
• $15 BestBuy Gift Card

Not a bad set of gifts, I'm happy with it, and these headphone make it easy to ignore everyone else now ;-)

I'm thinking I'll use that BestBuy gift card to purchase this case for the Canon that I got from Diana last night. All in all it worked out pretty well, now to get my ass kicked at Sins of a Solar Empire....

Christmas Eve!

I just spent a nice Christmas Eve at my girlfriend's father's house. I got there around 3:30PMish, just in time to help her dad lift her grandfather back in to his wheelchair, an interesting opening. All the presents I brought were stowed under the tree and then Danny and I started a nice game of LittleBigPlanet. Once that was done, some of her other relatives had arrived so we went upstairs for drinks and snacks and socializing. I had a lot of fun with that, her family is hilarious, then after that we went back downstairs and channel surfed, ended up settling on the last 3/4 of Volcano (and for the record, I still think Dante's Peak is better!) before dinner. Dinner for me and Di consisted of Ravioli's and pasta, and soda's. Nothing too fancy, but still good! After dinner was more talking and watching Danny play some more games, then we got to present exchange time! Diana loved the speakers and the necklace I got her, and her brother enjoyed the 1600 XBOX Live points I purchased him. She gave me a really nice (and overly expensive!) Canon PowerShot A2000 IS digital camera, and her dad chimed in an 8GB memory card for it, as well as free movie passes and an Applebee's gift card! After that there was a lot of picture taking, including a new shot for my desk picture frame, which I'll post later, and a lot of Diana running away from my camera :). Also, she recieved a cool quiz game, which she announced to all her relatives she was going to beat me on, and then when we played after all the relatives left, I kicked her butt... Twice :)

And now I'm home, it was a great night though, and I'm now tired, but hungry...

Merry Christmas!

The guts!

Here are the guts of the supply! I checked out all the obvious stuff. Visual inspection of the capacitors shows they're intact. The load resistors and control potentiometers are also good, and the strapping on the back is all set for one of the supplies. Next up I'm going to get the other set up. First, a break.

Screenshot!

I felt like posting this screenshot showing how much crap I have open on both monitors, if you didn't know any better I'd look really busy and productive!!

One of the best purchases I ever made

These are my nice multimeter probes hooked up to my Data Precision 3500 multimeter. I got them on eBay for around $12. Well worth it! The comfortable grip, sturdy cables and long tips are a joy to work with. So much nicer then the crappy plastic ones on my pocket RS meter. You might notice the meter has binding posts on it. I just used my knife to cut the boot off the probes. They'll still work fine in a regular meters recessed ports.

Topless photos!

Now that I got your attention....
I'm going to attempt to rid this sucker of some problems tonight!

Christmas tree.....

.....That I loathe. I generally love Christmas, and I have never minded a fake tree, but this one takes away all the fun. Unfold, plug in. I refuse to touch, or further decorate it. I hate it. A lot.

Here is your answer!

Its the video signal out of that little dome camera I disassembled on top of the oscilloscope. Its also hooked in to my TV to make the video feed is alright. I'm testing it out, seems to have a damaged, flaky internal connection. I'm also working on another project. More details to come....

Just to prove I actually use this stuff

See? Look, I'm working right now. Can anyone tell me what this waveform is? Post a comment if you can!

Workbench!

Cobbled this together today. You can see my oscilloscope and multimeter stacked up there. Next to it is my 6253A dual power supply holding up the rest of the scope. On top of that is my surge protector monitor stand and on top of that is my ThinkPad. It's a lot sturdier than it looks. Now back to configuring.

Whoo! It's over!!!

Five finals, two projects, and a lot of not sleeping later, the Fall 2008 semester is over, and my exams are done! All except for one little write up....

So here's the breakdown:

EE341 - Microelectronics

The exam was a little brutal, but I made it through alright, lots of first final of the week anxiety there. Expecting a B in the course.

EE321 - Systems and Signals Processing

This exam was mostly not bad, plenty of studying went in to it and I could do almost all of it no problem, the only three problems I couldn't do, it turns out two of them were broken, and given to us as freebies, so I'm expecting to do well on the final. However the course did not go so well for me due to some... issues. So I'm only sporting a C here.

HIST230 - Science and Society

This was painful, literally, my hand was cramping, two essays, several pages, handwritten. I think I did pretty well, looking for a B in the course here.

EE363 - Generic Programming

I nailed this one, hands down nailed it, lots and lots of studying, and practice, and reference sheets, and I scored a 93, an A, and a B in the class, bam!

STAT383 - Applied Statistics I

This was way easier than it should have been, I am seriously thinking that I might have a 100% perfect score, which will give me an A, otherwise probably a B, this was my last final and I finished it in exactly 40 minutes, shocked my professor pretty good.

Then there was my Advanced Digital Design project that replaced my final exam for that class, should be an A on the project and an A on the course. Awesome :)

I'll post more about the ADD project later!

Greg built a response analyzer

Here is Greg working with his homemade response analyzer. He has the function generator (bottom) sweeping a frequency range through a can filter (not shown) and his scope is plotting the gain of the filter across the range of frequencies. Now he can calibrate the filters correctly. Very, very cool.

The prototype

Here is the trainwreck prototype of the LCD interface I built. The LCD isn't attached obviously. Look at all those wires. Such a mess!

The LCD interface circuit

Well last month Greg asked me to work on interfacing some LCDs for a project. That project got more or less shelved but this weekend I sat down to get some work done on it. After scouring the pins with a multimeter and much datasheet hunting, I built an interface circuit on a breadboard and whipped up some software to control it. After much debugging, using the labs logic analyzer, and Mountain Dew I got it working with "Hello World!" and now I intend to make a PCB to hold a basic interface board that can communicate of serial or USB to drive the display. Attached is Rev. 0 of the schematic! It's not done, it may not even be 100% accurate yet.

Working in the lab

Here's my bench with all my stuff, laptop and parts bins and a circuit connected to the logic analyzer on the DSO. You can see the latest capture on the scope screen too.

I get to do this next year!

Robotic Soccer Tournament! Bluetooth controlled too. Nifty.

She was whining so I am putting this up....

(3:08:52 AM) Caitlin: have i ever been mentioned in this blog?
(3:08:56 AM) Me: I don't think so
(3:09:05 AM) Caitlin: oh boring
(3:09:06 AM) Caitlin: haha, j
(3:09:07 AM) Caitlin: k
(3:09:15 AM) Me: haha
(3:09:18 AM) Me: I'll put you in it

There we go. I put her in it.

Whoooooaaaaa!

Steve decided to go ahead, and using pliers, stick this LED in a wall socket. It flashed *VERY* bright red, and then it basically exploded. You can see scorch marks on Steve's pliers! :)

Lab!

Most of the CompE class is sitting at this table working on projects. And I'm sitting here trying to figure out the weird bug that I walked away from last night.

Where did they come from?!

I never realized I had so many LCDs in my various boxes of stuff. Wow. I definitely need more cases.

Whoo parts!

I received my package from Futurlec today, and took a walk down to ACE Hardware to get two of these nice cases. I already filled them with the stuff I ordered, so I'm a little stuck since I also wanted to sort out my boxes of miscellaneous parts and such. Found a lot of interesting things in them. If you look closely you can see the prototype of the 2007-2008 Carputer for Baja. I'm afraid to power it up ;-)