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Alright now — back to work! Analog Test Wednesday and a report for Digital System Design due to tomorrow afternoon.
somethingintellectual: via yerawizardharry:skittlesorswimsuit:grangadanga
The CNC project is moving along slowly. I want to have the stepper motors turning and one axis built by the end of the month. My friend Nik is working on the Z-Axis now and I’m going to try connecting one of the motors to the controller board.
Plugs directly into the wall (120VAC) and its diffused with a plastic bottle
This weekend
I studied for a long time last night, again little this morning, and then reviewed in the hour before the test. The class is Digital System design and 40% of the class is a lab where we write VHDL, test it, synthesize it, and load it onto an FPGA — the other 60% is a lecture with thee tests. One down, two to go!
I flew through the first part of the test and went on to write my first VHDL model (an N-input NAND gate) with a confidence that I held until I saw the last question. “Given a state diagram below write a VHDL entity for the corresponding finite state machine”. We wrote a Moore Machine a few labs ago, but the inputs for this Mealy Machine combined with the requirement to separate synchronous and combination processes really confused me. I know I could have figured it out in about 20 minutes if I wasn’t under the pressure of a test — but for some reason I stalled out this afternoon.
I knew this semester was going to be busy — but I had no idea I be this busy. Tonight I’ve got to rework the presentation I gave at ‘Greening of the Campus’ for a state wide Resident Assistants conference that Auburn is holding tomorrow. I’m not an RA myself — rather I’ll be explain the logistics behind Hall Vs. Hall Energy, Water and Waste Reduction Competitions, specificially the model we (Auburn’s Office of Sustainability) developed running up to last February’s “Sustain-A-Bowl”.
I’m excited about settling into a niche at work — and I’m looking forward to working with other schools and Lucid Design Group to organize a national competition like RecycleMania but for energy and water as well. But I’m not excited about the massive pile of homework that I need to get started on tomorrow — hmmph, well if I work hard tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday I can afford to go out Saturday night and spend some time in the Sol of Auburn shop on Sunday.
My friend Nik and I spent last night soldering the motor controller board for our CNC machine.
…and it’s the end of another short week. I had to hit the ground running when I got back Wednesday night — but after taking my signals test (Thank you Texas Instruments!) and taking care of my lab on Thursday life was a breeze. I felt fairly passive in my classes — taking notes and noting to read the material in the book later. For now I’m off to a friend’s house to get started on a weekend project.
I got back from Greening of the Campus earlier tonight and I’m already loaded down with the consequences of having to catch up in every single class as well as with Sol of Auburn. This was the first time I’ve made a presentation to a room that wasn’t a captive audience and it was exilerating. I spoke on the quasi-longterm (4 month) impact of a energy, water, and waste reduction competition that I worked on last year. I didn’t have my slides done until about 3 hours before my talk — and hadn’t gone through the presentation in it’s entirety a single time. I was told I was talking for about 18 minutes — but it felt like it was less than 10. After that I took part in a workshop on organizing running energy reduction competitions among groups. The idea is that any organization that can monitor the electricy/water usage of its building weekly can take part. The schools report kWh once a week (or feed in real time data if this is possible) and the data is logged and graphed (as kWh, dollars, the mass of the carbon produced, and a few more) on the competition website. Groups could form amoung rival schools, amoung fraternites. If that sounds interesting to you check out what LucidDesignGroup is working on.
My brother is in Shanghai with my dad for the next week. I went the summer before last, which in “college years” seems much longer past. The fall/spring/summer divide really does mess with your sense of time.
Soren Kierkegaard. (via nihilnoetia)
Less than one week of summer left. What will next semester bring?
