Been buuuusy!

Hey everyone. Its been very busy lately, very very busy. Sorry I haven't updated. I'm in the midst of several final projects, studying for final exams and other stuff. Like finding an apartment for the summer, since I was offered (and accepted) an internship at Assured Information Security. (http://www.ainfosec.com) I'm actually on the way there now, sitting in the passenger seat posting this from my BlackBerry. My friend, new coworker and roommate Matt Franklin is driving. We're going to take care of some paperwork regarding employment and security clearance. Then we're going out to survey a few apartments to see what we have to work with. Officially I start work May 18th, so I don't have much time to move in and get settled. It's sure going to be an interesting summer!

But we're not *quite* there yet, so here's the rundown. The big project on deck is of course for junior lab. I'm working with my current roommate, Allen, and a friend from the FIRST team, Doug. We got to pick our project, he gave us a couple suggestions but we ignored it and went way over the top. Using an Altera/Terasic DE2 development board, housing a Cyclone II FPGA, and the Nios II soft-processor we built a video game console. But ours is cooler than most because it has no controllers. A web cam attached to a PC is calibrated to track the players motion, and then the player actually moves around and runs/jumps to play games. Doug developed the image tracking software and the VHDL graphics accelerator hardware. I developed the game engine and the SD Card 'cartridge loader' and Allen is writing the game code. It also incorporates a wireless heart rate sensor so the game can scale in difficulty and speed according to an exercise profile/target heart rate. All in all, it is almost done, due Thursday. Everything big works, just debugging the game and heart rate monitoring stuff. We should hit the date with everything working. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about embedded systems design in the process. I definitely enjoyed the project.

I have three final exams, which is a lighter load than previous semesters because of the fact most of my classes are design project oriented this semester. Then the moving frenzy begins!!

Speaking of, I got a nice Townhouse apartment on campus next semester, with Matt, Steve Deyo and Ryan D. I'm happy about that too.

Let's see.... The pictures in the previous two posts were from an adventure in the apartment of Greg Linder. I needed to suck less at soldering so he 're-taught' me using a little motor PWM driver kit he had laying around. He also pawned a lot of miscellaneous crap off on me. And he's trying to get me to take a behemoth computerized HP oscilloscope. I want it, really badly, it's so cool!

But.. It IS a behemoth. It really is huge. I can't even find a place to cram it temporarily. So it may get sacrificed. I'm gonna try to find a way to make it work, I promise.

Well that's enough for now. Watch for more updates!