Academic Adventures

Balloon Launch in <9 Hours!

2008-09-05T21:41:00.005-07:00

UAT Nearspace is launching it's first high altitude balloon, tomorrow at 1300 Zulu. The APRS callsign for the balloon's tracker will be "KD0EHH-1." You can view a live map of the flight at aprs.fi or take a look at the embedded map below. If all goes well we should reach an altitude of 90,000 feet MSL and land about 50 miles from our launch site. We are expecting to land around 1600 Zulu, keep an eye out for falling objects:)

Follow my semester break over APRS!

2008-08-21T08:54:00.012-07:00

In an effort to test out the APRS tracking equipment my classmates and I will be using on our nearspace ballon project, I will be mounting all of the gear in my car over the semester break. Starting tomorrow you'll be able to track my whereabouts using the global APRS network as I travel from Tempe, AZ to Durango, CO. The callsign for the tracker will be "KD0EHH-1." My trip is expected to last until August 27th, I'll try to keep the tracker operational as long as possible over the next week. Thanks to aprs.fi you can check my location via the live map below.

Wipe & Reload

2008-08-16T12:04:00.002-07:00

My desktop has been running pretty well for two years without reloading windows and I finally have the chance to clean it up with a reformat. I contemplated installing Vista as the main OS but I'm not quite ready to give up on XP. Vista has an attractive interface and is a touch more secure than XP, but it's just not worth the driver hassles. The last installation of Vista had a crazy hibernation problem that caused graphics problems upon wakeing up. I know that I'll eventualy have to move up to a new MS OS, hopefully Windows 7 will be a bit better.

A Strange Signal

2008-08-12T14:26:00.003-07:00

Early in the morning (1:00am) on August 11th, 2008 as my friends and I were attempting to leave Las Vegas after attending BlackHat and Defcon, I picked a strange signal on 5.900MHz. It was a very weak AM transmission of a women's voice repeating the names of colors, "Purple, Purple, Black, Red, Green, Black, Blue..." This was recived near Boulder City, NV around 1:00am. I havn't been able to find any infromation relateing to this station's purpose or identification on the internet. The repeating color names seems similar to the triditional "numbers station" type transmission. If anyone has infromation reguarding this signal please leave a comment, I would love to know more about the nature of this singal.

Update: It seems that Numbers Station V02 is located at 5.898MHz. It transmits numbers in Spanish from Cuba, which ends up sounding a lot like color names at a very low signal quality. V02 is most likely my mystery signal.

Viva Blackhat/Defcon 16

2008-07-31T08:36:00.002-07:00

I'm off to Las Vegas for Blackhat 2008 and Defcon 16. I can't wait to see what Kingpin and Lost have in store for us this year.

RTFM Harddrives

2008-07-10T18:16:00.003-07:00

I built my desktop PC in August of 2006, nearly two years ago. I purchased two Seagate 7200.10 320GB Barracuda's for my main drive. I had done some research and found that these would give me a good deal of speed (when in RAID) for a decant amount of money (way less than a WD Raptor).

Since the drives were SATA I didn't think twice about the jumpers on the back because they are traditionally used for ATA master/slave settings. I figured they were for factory settings that needn't be changed. It turns out I was wrong! Those jumpers have been cutting my drive performance in half. Seagate uses them to ensure that SATA/150 is the default drive configuration for backwards compatibility. My system has supported SATA/300 since its build date. So i popped the little buggers out and did some testing. Turns out that they made a big difference in performance. Test results below...

With Jumper

Without Jumper

SX Protoboard Assembly

2008-07-08T21:08:00.008-07:00

I'm finishing up a PCB project that's nearly a year old and I thought I'd share a tasty time-lapse video of the assembly process.

Here's My Card...

2008-07-08T09:58:00.005-07:00

Since I'll be roaming around Blackhat and Defcon once again this year it isn't a bad idea to carry around some sort of correspondence card. I've avoided creating a business card because of the challenging nature of their design. In order to stand out from other cards a business card has to offer something unique. It has to dazzle its recipient, either in its unique size, material, or design.

Lately I've seen a few skinny or mini cards being handed out, small 1"x3" cards. I've only been able to find two printers that produce them at the moment, Zazzle.com and MOO.com. Both companies offer 100 cards for about $20.00. Zazzle is a tiny bit cheaper than the later and offers a few different paper types, both front and back can be printed with graphics, however you are limited to a single design for the entire set of 100. While MOO only allows a single side to be a graphic, you are allowed up to 100 different graphics per set of 100.

I have a few designs in mind that would fit perfectly on these mini cards, I suppose I'll test the waters by printing my own before I drop $20.

Update @ 1:33pm: Matthew Inmen did exactly this. However, he's a much better artist than myself.

3 Year Mission to Seek Out Star Trek

2008-06-30T08:23:00.004-07:00

Lord of The Ring's Marathon: 683 minutes (extended)

Every Episode of The Simpsons: 9780 minutes (w/ film)

Star Trek Anthology: 38,804 minutes (646.8 hours/26.95 Days)

Star Trek Movies I-X: 1144 minutes
~~Enterprise: 4900 minutes~~
The Origional Series: 4000 minutes
The Animated Series: 660 minutes
~~The Next Generation: 8900 minutes~~
Deep Space 9: 8800 minutes
~~Voyager: 8600 minutes~~
The Hidden Frontier (fan): 1800 minutes

"If Spock were here, he'd say that I was an irrational, illlogical human being for going on a mission like this....... Sounds like fun!" -- Kirk

Using Previsualization for Projects

2008-06-29T10:04:00.006-07:00

Before diving right into a project I like to come up with a general vision of the end product and an idea of what I'm going to need to do in order to reach that vision. It's easier to recognize problems before they even creep up if you know how each stage of a project is supposed to turn out. For most projects it's possible to keep that vision in my head while I work, for some I have to draw it out on paper. Some projects however, require a bit more work before I can visualize the end result.

For example, I'm working on a lamp that could take on a variety of shapes and configurations. I know that it will use glass insulators and antique light bulbs, perhaps suspended by wire, perhaps supported by brass stems. Since I'm limited to the materials at hand I need to decide on a final configuration for the lamp before I start working.

Luckily computers provide the perfect virtual workshop free from the fear of making mistakes and wasting materials. Using tools like Google's SketchUp and Autodesk's Maya, I can quickly create virtual models of my projects. I can examine size, material choices, lighting, and even how a user will interact with the project before a single hole is drilled.

Reworking the Site

2008-06-25T09:22:00.004-07:00

I've always thought that FriedPope.com is a bit of an akward name to present to an employer, thus I'm forced to start thinking of a new site structure and URL. FriedPope.com has been renewed for at least another year, so I'll have some time to determine my course of action.

I belive I'll start with determining what exactly I want to present to visitors. I may want to split up the sites into more managable sections. A few good sites that I'll be looking to for help are:

A List Apart

Wikiversity Web Design

Smiley Cat

KillerSites

Pixel Acres

Joining Amateur Radio

2008-06-18T08:54:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since my last post, I've been keeping up with school and my internship at Honeywell Intellectual Property International. One of my current classes, "Nearspace," has persuaded me to obtain my amateur radio license. In the class we will be launching a high altitude balloon that will communicate with ground crews over a radio link using a frequency somewhere in the 2m band. Before using this band the FCC requires that the control operator (fancy word for button pusher) be a licensed, Technician Class, HAM. The test was fairly easy, only 35 questions pulled from a publicly reviewed pool. So far seven members of the class have their licences and callsigns. If you're ever on the radio and hear KD0EHH, say hello!

Don't Have Enough Cognitive Power

2008-04-16T02:23:00.002-07:00

Attached to this is the SX28 code for UAT's Commencement board. It's here for safekeeping, if you find it have some fun.
UAT.SXB

Discovering Asterisk

2008-03-09T11:56:00.012-07:00

I started playing around with Asterisk last week and discovered the amazing power and limitless list of possibilities that the open source PBX has to offer. I'll be documenting my installation sometime soon and I'll post it under the projects section. In the meantime I thought I'd share a little snipit of my extensions.conf file that might be useful to someone.

I spent most of yesterday building a voice prompt that would correctly speak a perfectly synchronized Zulu time. The extensions code is pretty simple, it speaks a time that is 10 seconds ahead of the start of the playback. When the playback is over it waits in a loop until the time is exactly as read and then plays the sync tone.

exten => 1,n,Answer
exten => s,n,Ringing
exten => s,n,Wait(3)
exten => s,n,Playback(at-tone-time-exactly)
exten => s,n,Set(tonetime=$[${EPOCH}+10])
exten => s,n,SayUnixTime(${tonetime},Zulu,R \'and\' S \'seconds\' \'phonetic/zulu\')
exten => s,n,While($[${EPOCH} < ${tonetime}])
exten => s,n,EndWhile
exten => s,n,SendDTMF(C,120)
exten => s,n,Wait(2)
exten => s,n,Hangup

Gargoyle Ad Initium

2008-02-23T20:34:00.011-07:00

The parts are flowing in and I'm starting to assemble UAT's first wearable computer for student research and development. The initial stages of building the wearcomp will require a lot of tinkering and adjustment so I don't expect to have it on 8 hours a day until I'm ready to deal with software tweaks.

The system thus far consists of a VIA Nano-ITX NX12000 with 1GB of RAM. I've added a 200mW Atheros 802.11abg mini-PCI card and a Bluetooth dongle for connectivity. Storage is a 120GB WD laptop SATA drive, we'll see how long it lasts being strapped to my side. The display currently attached to the machine is a Vuzix VR920, it's definitely not meant for wearable computers, however it is an interesting display. I'll talk about why later in the post. Second from the display, the most important peripheral is the input device. We have a few different devices on the way, but until they arrive I've chosen to use a wiimote as a pointer. Batteries are on the way and should show up this week in the lab, I'm tethered to the wall for now.

All of the hardware has been mounted on two chunks of cardboard using standoffs and zip-ties, eventually acrylic will replace the cardboard. It's mounted in a thrift store waist pack, the least geeky one I could find. With the vr920 running and the CPU at 100% the whole setup takes 24W (yikes, too much!). Not too bad for the first day worth of work though. You can see the whole picture set in the wearcomp gallery.

As for the VR920 headset, I'll be replacing it with a more transparent and lightweight display. The VR920 was designed for short periods of use (<2 hours) while watching movies or playing games. While the display has a small resolution (640x48), it can scale up to 1024x768. Text is only readable at resolutions less than 800x600. The device gets very hot. It must be unplugged when the system starts and then reattached once the USB bus is active to activate the display, otherwise it sits at a black screen. Both the head-tracker and audio built into the display have very limited support in Linux. The headphones pop when the system reboots, very loudly, and the unit blocks out half my vision. While it has it's uses, the VR920 was not meant to be a primary display, especially not for a wearcomp.

I'll keep the posts coming, check out the UAT Hardware Studio Wiki for more information on the Gargoyle project.

Fish Tank Update

2008-01-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

After about a week of running my DIY CO2 injector on my freshwater tank I've decided I need more plants and more light, I'm really inspired by Takashi Amano's work. The pH has leveled off at about 7.1, nearly where I wanted it. I have a kH test kit on the way to check out my water hardness, it's a good thing to know when messing with CO2. Since my 2 liter CO2 yeast generator is already starting to fizzle out I'll add another bottle in the setup and post some pictures when I finish. Also on the way is a Pollen Glass to diffuse the CO2 into the water a bit better. Currently I have 15W of light from the AllGlass florescent fixture I've had forever, I really want to upgrade this to get around 40W or a bit more. With that amount of light I should be able to grow anything. I only have Anubias Bateri tied to the rocks right now until I get the lighting and CO2 stable. I'll keep you posted.

Today's Lesson, PID Control Loops

2008-01-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

PID stands for Proportional-Integral-Derivative, it is a closed loop sensor feedback system. It provides smooth and responsive reaction to sensor input changes that allow for robots that can follow, balance, and avoid among other reactions. The process starts with a proportional measurement of error from a set goal. The system attempts to correct for the error by reacting in the opposite direction, proportionally. This alone does not handle changes over time, a change in sensors that changes at a constant rate forces the P section to never reach its set goal. The integral portion of PID Loops allows the system to catch up to the set goal before maintaining a proportional value. The last part of a PID system is the derivative, the rate of change at any point in time. This calculation provides rapid responses to rapid changes. The wikipeida article on this topic is a little heavy but contains images that make understanding PID Loops easier.

Starting Spring Semester

2008-01-13T19:58:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a lot finished up in the past three days before I head into spring semester tomorrow. I roughly completed a DIY CO2 injection system for my fish tank today. I'm adding plants back into the aquarium and having a little bit of CO2 might help them out. You can learn a lot more about the concept on John LeVasseur's site. Basically I'm using a yeast culture in a 2liter bottle to produce the CO2 and letting it bubble into my aquarium through an air-stone. So far everything seems to be working out, although I'm only about eight hours into the experiment. I started with a rather high pH of 7.6, I'm hoping to lower this to about 7 using CO2. I've noticed a drop to 7.4 since I took the 7.6 measurement yesterday. I'm hoping this huge swing was just due the the vast water replacement two days ago. I'll check the pH in a few hours and see whats going on.

The best Dihydrogen Monoxide money can buy!

2007-12-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

Everybody living in Phoenix knows how terrible the dihydrogen monoxide in the valley can be. I stumbled upon a solution to the problem while routinely browsing the Internet; it's called Infinity. Take a look for yourself... Infinity Dihydrogen Monoxide

Problem?

2007-12-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

Really, how far does this have to go before somebody does something?

U.S. Plans to Screen All Who Enter, Leave Country (via WP)

Mind Mapping ala Ajax

2007-11-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Mind mapping has always been pushed by professors and business planners as one of the best ways to collaborate on ideas with a group of peers. German company, Codemart, released an on-line mind mapping service called MindMeister earlier this year. MindMeister allows users to create maps in concert with other users allowing for massive brainstorming sessions and a level of interactivity that could never be achieved on a white board. Maps can be printed, shared, or published to a web page with a touch of code. I'm looking forward to using this on a project in the future.

Snow Crash, Comming Soon!

2007-11-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Neil Stephenson's third novel, Snow Crash. Set in a not-so-distant cyberpunk future, Snow Crash tells the story of the freelance hacker Hiro. Although published in 1992 much of the technology in the book is already showing up in our reality. I'm sure that Mr. Stephenson saw much of this coming in his research and decided to include it in his book. In the interest of not destroying the book for those who haven't read it I won't go into detail about the technology I found interesting. This is just a short list of Snow Crash Tech and its real life counterparts...

The Metaverse -- SecondLife
CIC Application "Earth" -- NASA WorldWind
Armorgel -- d3o impact absorption material

JPL's ATHLETE

2007-11-06T22:28:00.000-07:00

This new JPL robot is one of the most versatile and unique robots I have ever seen. It might also be one of the most expensive, six sides and six wheels, all together 24 cameras to drive and operate tools. Imagine the size of the data stream this will be sending from the moon, if and when it gets there. Take a look at the video...

Source: NASA JPL

Fab Lab Excitement

2007-10-31T22:18:00.000-07:00

In 2005, Neil Gershenfeld, one of the minds behind MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, published an innovative book on Personal Fabrication called FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop. FAB is a reflection and future vision of Industrial Fabrication becoming individually accessible. Imagine having the ability to design, print, and assemble nearly anything in your own home, with a FAB lab that vision is nearly within reach. For about $25,000 in equipment and parts students at MIT have been experimenting with personal fabrication in a course called "How to make (Almost) Anything." The FAB equipment that Prof. Gershenfeld teaches on usually requires a steep learning curve and a background knowledge of industrial techniques out of the box. The environment of the laboratory nearly eliminates these requirements and enables anyone to step up to a machine and start creating. A simple process of scanning a drawing into a computer and spitting it out to a vinyl cutter can be achieved with a mere button press, calling for absolutely no contact with complex software. For more advanced tasks, online documentation provides instructions and tips to help out new users. There's even a collection of tools being developed for Ubuntu at Fabuntu.org. The entire concept is lit up my brain like a field of fireflys with ideas and dreams. Learn more for yourself at FAB Central.

Slackers

2007-10-30T23:43:00.000-07:00

It's fairly well known that a lot of college students are "slackers." For some unknown and appalling reason, students choose to spend their money (or their parents money) on educational resources that they knowingly disregard in order to play games and grow moss. The student body of my university is no exception to the appearance of "slackers." In fact the very nature of the degrees offered tend to attract more than the usual population. Luckily most of the kids that have the slacker mentality decide that higher education wasn't the right choice and drop out. It's the ones that won't leave that bother me. They show up to class, maybe once or twice every month, and even then sleep in the corner. Their off and on presence forces the instructor to include them in group activities, where they pick up minuet amounts of credit for emailing the entire class at the last second and giving some BS story about never being given an assignment.

If you or someone you know is showing signs of "slacking," seek a deep canyon and jump.

Please.