NASA/Santa Cruz Update

Whew! one week down! Here is a small bunch of pics from your long and frequently lost brotha! (though I have to say, I thank God for my GPS... it has been a life-saver).

This pic is of my accomadations... pretty nice digs, eh? I feel quite at home amongst the shelves of books, it reminds me of my room. In that vein, I found out today that we have to move out of the chico house by July 4th, so we gotta find a new place. That was fun while it lasted, but it is always fun to change up too... Anyhow, without further ado, I give you the pics!

I arrived early Sunday morning, and Scott and Aunt Sharon let me sleep through church (at home), but after the service, we all had lunch together and after running a few errands we worked on the plane.... it was fun!

notice the cart with screws on it? that was most of my job... put a buch of screws into the wing and call it good. And to think, this fellow flies! Amazing! I think it is tradition to have peanutbutter m&m's when working on the plane because I was rationed a few handfulls for my efforts. Unfortunately, one of those handfulls fell prey to a certain marauding pilot who spotted them unattended. this next pic was taken just minutes after he confessed to such a grievous crime. See the remorse in his eyes? :P

the first couple days, I didn't have an office of my own, so I kinda tagged along with Scott to his office and lab to read and research. Pictured below is the building where the lab he works in is, taken essentially from the building where his office is.

this picture (below) is a cool shot of the big wind tunnel inlet. It is taken from the perspective of Scott's office (facing the opposite direction from the pic above). This tunnel (in the smallest part) is 120' wide by 80' tall! It is the largest in the world, but it is hard to get a feel for the scale until you are standing next to it! I thought this pic (below) showed the scale rather well. if you click on the pic, you can see there is a hockey game going on and you can see how small the people are compared to the inlet... crazy, huh? I kept chuckling thinking about some prankster quickly turning it on and sucking all of the hockey player to wall for a bit... that'd be funny. ;)

this next pic, below, is another shot of the big tunnel, but this time from behind Scott's office building.

This is the building where I work. It is an army building that specializes in rotorcraft. Location, location, location... this buidling is nicely located directly across from the research center's cafeteria... and they have good food! oh yeah! ;)

If you were to turn 90 degrees left (counter-clockwise) from the pic above, you see the pic below. this is another shot of the big tunnel, and what it looks like down the street I'm on. (doesn't that song from my fair lady spring to mind?) Also, they have some sand volleyball courts there, which I think would be a lot of fun to join in on soon... Hopefully there are some ballers too, I have been told that there are some courts on the other side of the base.

Going into the building, my office is on the 2nd floor. Here is a shot of my desk and the development hardware that I am working on. Very cool stuff.

My office mate's window looking out on our little wind tunnel (7' x 10'). One thing that is kinda cool about the office is that the windows are like 8' tall, so if you open the blinds, you can see planes coming and going. Today we had an F-18 making low speed passes testing out something or other...

thanks for catchin' up with me, I'll post some cool pics of the model and helicopter tunnel when I can, that is really cool lookin'! Please forgive my lack of posting/calling this week -> I have been on the tired side, trying to get used to my new life for the summer... once I get more in sync, I'll be a little more social.

One more thing, I really need to get some pics of the three of us and our dinner/movie setup... it is really fun spending time with family that I've never really gotten to know. What a great thing to know your cousin and aunt better, and to have a nice place to live as well! I feel very blessed!

NASA ho!

Well, I have announcement to make:

I have been honored with acceptance into a graduate internship position with NASA/Ames Research Center over the summer! ;) Below is a shot of the center...

Ames is located in Mountain View, CA and specializes in wind-tunnel related research, but they do a lot of other things there too. My job is to design and implement a data acquisition system for an experimental helicopter rotor blade. Essentially, it is a trailing-edge flap (there are two per blade) that is independently controlled and will help reduce main hub vibration loads and noise as well as possibly increase power efficiency. I am very excited about it! I leave this evening (Sat) to go and stay with my aunt Sharon and cousing Scott in Santa Cruz, which will be a lot of fun.

I really love the unknown adventure aspect of this, it is very cool. Though, I haven't really had much of a chance to philosophize to the extent I might normally because I've been working really hard on trying to finish the Blackbox project this week. Okay, when I say finish, I mean phase 1 complete at least. That (As always) is proving to be a challenge, and I am looking forward to a time when I can relax slightly more on the weekends!

Anyhow, it's late and I need to sleep (I don't know what my sleep debt is, but I know I'm in the red!!) I just wanted to give a big shout out to all my peeps (yeah, I DID use that word) and let everyone know the good news. I wish you all a merry summer!

-Sir Gavin out!

P.s. I finally walked! yay! just to comemorate commencement, I (purposely?) forgot to put on sunscreen so I look a little darker than usual. But its all good, I hear the ladies like 'em tall, dark and handsome... two out of three ain't bad!! (:-P

The Gavin (up)date

Yowdy!

Welcome back loyal fans and patient family/friends! ;) Are you ready for yet another unpredictable and (odds are) inappropriate post? That what I thought... Let's get ready to RUMBLE!!!

Alrighty, the truth of the matter is, I thought that I should post something since I have remained silent for so long. While I can't announce anything tremendously earth-shattering (yet), I do in fact lead a full life, and can share some of that with you. So here it is, the goods, the juice, the dirt that makes this humble little blog a world-wide phenomenon!

I have about 3 weeks left (2 weeks of class and then finals week) which is followed by... (And the room fell silent)... commencement! ...the part of the show where Gavin puts on a cap and gown and walks down an aisle with a whole bunch of people and... formally graduates the life of Bachelorhood (soon to be a master!). Very exciting. I wasn't orginally going to walk since I will be walking again in spring 2010, but I was convinced otherwise. That will be on the 23rd or the 24th of May.

In other news, I have begun work on my thesis (which is turning out to be very enjoyable). though I haven't spent much time on that lately (classes and other pressures have been crankin' up the intensity). it is going to be a very cool, "smart" shaker head to shake olive trees (and anything else it grabs onto). Sorry about all the parenthesis here, I guess I'm in a parenthetical mood. =) I am really enjoying grad school. It is almost like the transition from high school to college where, all of a sudden, you could study the subjects that interested you and pick your own classes, except in this case, now I know what I like and I don't have to take general ed! it's great! ;) I should really be a college recruiter or something, eh?

Well, there is my quick update, I hope all you sportsfans enjoyed! hehehe, have a great day!

A Video is worth a million words...

Current Update

Hey Y'all:

Here is the latest update from the world of Gavin:

1. I went to the embedded systems conference last tuesday... It was fun, but there were no booth babes to see! ;) oh well, next time I guess. (jk). I actually won a few prizes there, including a Blu-Ray for Dad (independence day) which was pretty cool, and a T-shirt from another place... it was really good to see what people are selling and what some of the trends in the community are. It makes me feel a little less rookie, if you know what I mean.

2. I am going crazy with classes, at the moment. I enjoyed my trip down south, but it really put the pressure on in the other classes for this last week. So much so, that I barely got any sleep during the week, and missed a final on Friday. Not my finest moment, but then you live and learn I guess.

3. I decided to switch majors to art this week also... ;) Okay, not really, but I am going to help with tutoring in one of the art classes since they are using electronics to add intelligence and flash to their projects... that should be pretty cool. My professor accused me of helping just because there are good-lookin' women in the class... I think he just disagrees with my philosphical position on "outsiders" learning high-level theory. (But it doesn't hurt to have girls in the class either) ;).

4. I (finally) got my workstation to be stable at work (it's been crashing every few hours), which makes me infinitely more productive! I actually got some video stuff done this weekend for dad and he made his first DVD on his own (phone support only). That was really good.

5. I have some working models of trees (they are currently 2-dimensional), hydraulic cylinders (not totally finished, but they have control, mechanical, and hydraulic elements), and high-level, linear, mechanical shakers. On the whole, there are many good things about what the models are telling me ("the gold speaks to us, poppet"), but I am still getting used to the way that you build models in simscape and how to be smarter/more natural with my constructions.

6. I am now without the will to continue such a long list... therefore I will end thus.

On a more personal note, I am (as always) changing faster and more dramatically than before, so that makes it hard to give a "state of the union" type of summary as to where I'm at, but I'll do my best. Not knowing the future of my journey, seeing only that path that lies in front of me, I am struck with certain anomolies. First, everything I put my hand to (in terms of projects) seems to be going really, really well, so that hints to me that I am on the right track with my training and endeavors. As evidenced by my missing the exam last week, I see that my discipline needs a bit of work, but where I would have stopped there before, now I see some solutions to the problem. I think this is an appropriate level of depth for my audience (seeing as there are those that I'm unaware of reading my blog), so I'll not expound further than this. Hopefully I'll be able to share some further details/developments in these areas next post.

Sorry, no pics this time. Maybe next time I'll have some vids or pics to put up.

Sweet new stuff

Hey y'all:

It has been a little while since I've posted, but the world does not stand still! ;) Yesterday I learned about two crazy new things: 1. FPGA soft core processor architecture/flexibility and 2. the new mechanical circuit element -> the inerter!

Okay, okay... here's the skinny: FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a technology that has been gaining popularity and acceptance and is being used increasingly in a lot of different applications. Essentially, it is a completely programmable digital chip that allows you to program it with whatever you want and it becomes that! Y'know how in the Transformers movie the robots could transform to be a bunch of different things? This is the digital equivalent! ;) You can quite litterally say, "computer, I would like you to be a 16 core processing powerhouse with a custom processor that I am giving you the schematics for... now how cool is that? It's like having the blueprints for a machine and then magically handing them to a device that builds itself! Here is a typical block diagram of an FPGA with an embedded processor (Nios II) and some peripherals... everything inside the box can be totally changed the next day!





I've known about these badboys for awhile, but yesterday I learned some key new things: 1) the newest versions that have come out recently have enough logic resources to implement something like 700 cores! (though there aren't enough pins to support the input and output... for 700 cores) 2) while I would have thought that since this is a digital chip, I could not use it for things like D2A (Digital to analog conversion) and A2d (Analog to digital conversion), but I was happily wrong again! There is an implementation called Sigma Delta conversion that can use 1-bit at very high speed to convert between analog and digital and back again. All else that is needed is a filter on the other end... The implication of this is staggering: Let's just say that I am making an embedded system here in 2009, and I decide that I want to make a system that has two processors cores and 4 D2As and 4 A2Ds plus some other peripherals like timers and what communications links... then in several years, I realize, "Hey, what we really need our twice as many D2As, and another type of communications link, but one of my previous comm links has become obsolete... no problem! All I have to do is reprogram the chip and my wish is granted! It's like christmas any time you want!

The second part was about the "Inerter" (Shown below)



The idea is essentially to make a mechanical equivalent to the capacitor (or inductor, depending on which analogy you use). Springs store potential energy, right? you push a spring together and it "stores" that energy to push you back later. This device "stores" kinetic energy so that if you start it moving, it wants to continue moving along that course. What is cool about this is that it was recently used in Formula 1 racing and the car that had this technology in its suspension won the race! Very cool stuff. We might be able to use this on Case Machine (The new six-wheeler machine). It also allows software to have a little more freedom in how to optimize your suspension! For example, I could model whatever vehicle we're talking about, then give Matlab a starting point and ask it to optimize given certain criteria like, "Make the road soft inside the car" and "give me good control on the ground for steering and braking". Super cool stuff. Here is a diagram of how they used it as an anti-roll (the red part in the middle of the frame).

More to come here, this is just the beginning. I'll maybe go into a little more detail on some of this if someone wants me to, but this post is getting a little long so I'll leave it at that. Catch ya later.

I'm not a nerd! Really!

Well, I've alway hated that when people call me a nerd... not that it happens so often, but it's still a pet peeve. But I have to admit this one. At least it might come across nerdy (in a math way, mind you). This last Wednesday, I purchased a couple of software packages: Matlab (http://www.matlab.com/) which I need for software simulation and control system design and Mathematica (http://www.mathematica.com/) which I am planning to use for pure idea exploration in the math domain. I have used matlab for several years now, and it is very useful for the reasons I've listed above, but I had never used Mathematica before. That was Wednesday night.

On Thursday, I began to explore the functionality, language, etc. and get a feel for how Mathematica views the world. Much to my surprise, it views the world similar to how I do! ;) this is great because I have a lot of little tasks and things that I'm thinkin' about that I would love to explore in a natural way. The matchup was so close to how I think that I had some decent looking things going on the first day. I have spent a bit of time modeling the behavior of shaker heads and even written a few programs to easily manipulate/visualize this. Mathematica can accomplish the same thing that took me 10 hours before in one line of code! It's awesome! It automatically maps controls to variables and dynamically updates the plot window.


Friday, dad asked me a question regarding the design of a new topper/hedger and I was inspired with an opportunity to put Mathematica to use in a relevant project. The main thing is that it gets hard to read when you start putting in numbers first (it's easier to leave it symbolic for understanding's sake). That is where this app really shines! (can you tell that I'm excited?) In probably about 8 lines of code, I generated the following set of equations (sorry if it's hard to read, the points is that I didn't have to generate all those complicated conditions on the right by hand!)

So after implmenting these equations and getting to know the plotting features, I generated this beatiful little visualization of the cuts being made by a rotary topper (assuming certain constants like ground speed, bar size, tooth pitch, saw speed, star speed, etc.)... each color is generated by a seperate instance of the above two equations. This plot represents about 64 equations -- more than I want to type by hand!

I finished this functionality by noon on Saturday, which I think is an outstanding learning curve for software so capable. Not braggin here, I am just really impressed with how easy this is to use! $45 well spent! ($45 is the student rate, the commercial version is thousands of dollars).

So here is the bottom line: I'm not a nerd. I just love beatiful things! ;)