Monthly Archives: April 2014

Friday night – Senior Design Night

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Began the day with a quick visit to see dad.. then drove north in meetings all  the way.. I really don’t loose any work time with this trip. .

Got home from Boston today at 3PM just in time for the UVM Engineering Senior Design Night

Bill G and I have been mentoring this team on a fun bubble column project for ECHO.   The device they built is a model of what we might one day do for the bubble column at ECHO.  It’s been an adventure.. lots of design changes.. lots of new stuff to learn.. and it all came together at the last minute. Literally.. Mona was fixing the last code bugs at 2:45 just as they had to move the device over to the Davis center.  The device reads the position of both your hands and uses that to modulate the position of lights.. that represent the lights in ECHO’s ceiling.   When you balance the positions just right, the bubbles stop for a bit and you’re rewarded with a cool light pattern. Simple and elegant.

 

folks seemed to enjoy the piece..

 

 

Family came by including Mona’s mom

and Samir’s  folks

 

It really looked nice, and the team was proud.. and I was proud of all they’d done and learned.   I was also pleased and proud to see all the other awesome projects folks had built

 

this is a wind powered streetlight

 

an autonomos quad copter.

 

a new frame for Aero

A powerful robot

 

a snowboard flex tester

It wsa great to see the energy and fun in the room.. i really, really enjoyed it.. COngrats to all those senior engineers !

 

night all, night sam

-me

Thursday night – dads chair

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In Boston tonight staying at my folks house. Tonight my mom and I sat talking and between us was dad's chair.

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… My dad is now living nearby in a nursing home. I know that i haven't said this here, my father has Alzheimer's . He had to move there just over a month ago because my parents house was no longer safe for him. It was a hard decision for us all..ultimately it was the only decision we could make

I spent an hour with him today you looked like he was dreaming . he seemed peaceful which is what I would wish for him. .i wish him peace and comfort…. I wish i knew what else to say. I guess there is nothing that needs to be said

other than I love you dad

Nita all,nite sam

-me

 

 

 

Wednesday night -app-titude

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Okay got one more thing to cross off the life goal list. I've always wanted to be able to write iPhone and iPad apps and now I can …sorta… At least i know how to get other people to write apps for me. LOL. this week I was able to get three apps done that I hope to have for a conference next week. Each one with big help From friends.

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The first was written by my friends joshua and belinda in RTP. Its written in worklight … It uses Meeta's wearable fitness apis she built for our hackathon to extract data from my fitbit. It then displays it as a sexy graph vs everyone elses data (note my hyperactivity). All i did on this one is deploy it to my iphoen and ipad using devlopment. Certificates i bought from apple..cool !

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The second is the heart beat detector i created with huge help from good friend John S which i described last weekend ( my contribution.. Stare over his sholder and fetch john a beer)

This flow uses an optical pulse detector linked to an RFDuino. That links by bluetooth low energy to my Xcode iphone app.. Which sends the the pulse on by way of MQTT to a broker in canada, which communicates via wifi to a raspberry pi, where some python code coverts it into lights .. The result is a string of very bright LEDs that blink to my heart rate

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The third one was done as a big ask to my friend Nick P. He created an iphone app in xcode that links to a . TI sensor tag by way of bluetooth low energy.. Then ships that data up to MQTT.. Teh result is a pretty cool hand held acceleraometer, etc..

In each case i was able to midify the code.. My next rung on the learning ladder is to create something this cool without help.. Old dog and new tricks.. But im learning !..
Or at least im learning enough to ask for help 🙂
 
Nite all,nite sam
-me

 

Tuesday night – a bit fit

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Over the last several weeks I’ve been doing a project at work around wearable fitness devices and how we can use that data in interesting ways. As part of that, I’ve been weariness a fitbit. It’s a simple wrist watch like device that measures your movement.. essentially, it’s a fancy pedometer.

It syncs up with my hone or tablet whenever I’m near them..and records the data in th cloud. We pull that data out using API’s and analyze it.. it’s really fun. Today I got a summary of my activity.. Somehow I feel more like a real person since i have more numbers associated with each of my days..

 

Hey.. one step at a time !

 

nit all,nite sam

-me