Happy fourth of July.

I hereby pledge at least twice a week to write more.  It turns out I actually have a reader. A program I randomly signed up for eight months ago has brought me some great answers for engineers starting over in a new career field. If you would like to try it sign up for www.mentornet.com. It's a great way to meet and ask professionals some serious questions without going through the interview process for a job. I enjoyed it throughly as my mentor really gave me some great advice.

The speed dome project is slowing down.. :( I know I uncovered an Altera FPGA device and another programmable mico controller within the device. and unless anyone knows how to extract actual VHDL of VERILOG out of those devices I am pretty well going to have to leave that item a black box. The other problem I have is that "Sensornet" is proprietary and not much is know about it. I did manage to find a basic string of answers from someone on the internet who stated this:


Sensormatic protocol in a nutshell:
4800 baud start bit 1, data 8, parity none, stop bits 2.


to send simple single byte commands send three bytes
byte 1: ID of dome (set with the rotary switches)
byte 2: the command
byte 3: checksum formed by subtracting byte 1 and byte 2 from 0x00.


the dome will acknowledge reception by sending its ID.


single byte commands in hex:
80 home
81 start pan left (24 degrees / s)
82 idem right
83 stop pan
84 start tilt up
85 idem down
86 stop tilt
87 focus near
88 focus far
89 stop focus
8a zoom in
8b zoom out
8c stop zoom
8d start pan fastest mode (96 degrees / s)
8e start pan fast mode (48 degrees / s)
8f start pan normal modfe 
90 iris open
91 iris close
92 stop iris
93 stop all movement


There is much more it can do and learn but that takes more complex multi byte communications.
The above provides for basic control. 

So it's a start. I have the jumpers set. to go and am going to try a "Shift out" command via a handy Arduino.

Today being the fourth I am going to be hopefulPublish Postly enjoying some fireworks tonight. I caught Maroon 5 in concert on Saturday at Summerfest this past weekend as well. They are actually AWESOME in concert. I did not think at all that it would have been that great. I also learned how to play cricket this past weekend. A confusing game at first but then after a while you get used to it and stop thinking about it in terms of baseball.

Have a good one

With the Job going well we decide to attack a Sensormatic Speed Dome 2000

Okay... another month has gone by but things are going very well. I have been working hard at my new job at GE healthcare and completed some cool tasks. The foremost is the GUI program I wrote in MATLAB to convert selected parts of a .MAT file into CSV files. I had not written any type of program until that time and for a while it kicked my butt until I started asked questions on Matlab forums and got some great answers and some great help. I am also setting up our new electronics lab outside the clean room so we don't have to suit up to test anything. It can be a hassle sometimes as there is no bathroom in the cleanroom.

So with that said I started a new project today. Last year a friend gave me an old Speeddome 2000 camera on a three axis control system from Sensormatic. it's old (maybe 1998 ish) but apparently it still works.If not I will toss it and bury myself in something else.) I have to replace one voltage sensor that was broken. a 0.79 cent part from digikey but the problem is ordering from digikey that one part will wind up costing around ten bucks due to shipping.So I'm going to hold off until I get a few more things on my list.

I powered the device up this weekend. I have a few old but large 60Hz transformers sitting around from various devices I took apart. No labels but I sent a signal through a signal generator at two volts and figure out how they were wound by guessing the primary and secondary windings and looking at the voltage peaks at the secondary sides.

The device needs 24 Volts.... AC. I'm not totally sure why. I'm curious to see if the voltage gets rectified inside somehow.  The transformer generated 22 vac and that was within specs. I hastily tied it all togather and voila'  the device powered up. Here are some pictures below.

If anyone has any detailed info on these babies let me know. I am looking up all the IC's I can get at on the device. There are a few IC's with programs on them I am going to try and extract the programs from. no idea how but We'll try.

This will probably take a while but my goal is to be able to control this thing to tilt and rotate on command from an Arduino or something.

Thanks all

Bill

DONE. (Period)

Holy Moly it's been two weeks since I wrote anything. Alas I have more time! Let's break down what happened.
First Senior Design Ended. I will post pics as soon as can find them. I spent the most on the device and therefore it is mine. What I will do with it remains to be seen. We finished a few days ahead of schedule and fixed the last thing a few hours before our presentation. We were last to present and went through the whole thing reather quickly. The questions asked were very good. The esteemed professor Armstrong was at our presentation and grilled us somewhat. Our demonstration worked flawlessly. and the perfect moment when we hooked our project up to the router to my laptop forming a little tiny network and controlled it via the ethernet connection was (I don't know how to express it exactly) pure engineering awesomeness. They were all very pleased. Three of the group went our to celebrate and the final one went home.

Of the four in our group three worked hard. One had a child a week before the project was due and this was not entirely her fault but we became very annoyed when her stuff stopped working and she left claiming she had to "Go". We spent four hours troubleshooting her block before it began to breathe again.

IT worked during the presentation and we all help our breaths for a moment while the sensors were activated.
Flex sensors I learned cannot be continuously deflected or they will lose their springlike qualities. I learned this the hard way and though they worked in the end they were only able to tell us if it were full or empty. not 1/2 full or whatnot. Next time I'll use something different. 

The Arduino Mega board almost melted down on the eve of the last night. I had to buy a back up which I will return as I already have a mega and have no need for another.

Senior design (EE595) was not technically difficult but just a lot of busy work. If you undertake it I have a few  good ideas for you to contemplate before you really dive into it.

First: use what you are comfortable with. The semester is no time to learn a whole new microprocessor or language. I used an Arduino because I had one and was able to play with it for a while before using it on the project.

Next figure out what you can do with whatever you are comfortable with. Look around the internet for example code and if you can find some use that device and slap it on your compiler. The whole Idea of the project is to build something unique and document it. going way out to left field is where so many groups failed. Later on during your own time, try out the new designs, chips and code. but during SD stick to what works. You will have enough problems as it is.

Don't wait till the last minute to buy and assemble. it make cost you a few extra bucks buying a part or two that you didn't use but waiting until two weeks left to assemble the device leaves little room for error. when you choose your project have it all researched out. with a good idea if not a concrete one on how to do what you want. this will entail you to think a lot about your design before the class starts but trust me It's worth it!!!

Lastly stay organized and keep up to date with the paperwork. Getting behind will kill you faster than a superbug. A few groups had to finish their paperwork after they presented which turned into a nightmare.

Tomorrow, my first day as a free man I am getting up and going to a VHDL seminar to re-hash my skills and sharpen any dull knives. I will be doing a lot of this later on but it's never too late to re kindle older knowledge. Wish me luck :)

Fun with Firmware

Twelve days left ot go before I am a college graduate for the second time around. Today I have been beating my self to death with firmware problems. I am first off going to post the code when it is complete. This will hopefully inspire someone else to improve my design and make it better.


I just got News that Osama has finally bitten the dust.

It's 1 am I'm going to bed

Ready Set.... Employed!

That's right I got a JOB the company is General Electric. I had a long but good sit down conversation with the Engineer in charge during an interview. I figured I had to beat out one other guy but low and behold they made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. So now I have to get my suit dry cleaned and figure out what to do with 10 more hours of free time during my we--- Oh wait Senior Design! A sprint to the finish with less stress. Oh Please go fast these next two weeks

Peace out

Acutally see you soon :)

Fifteen days later

Last test tomorrow for Senior Design. The last test I'll be taking in at least six months. I have been studying like a madman. The laste few weeks have been a blur of interviews. I've had an average of two sit down interviews a week and and two phone interviews. I am now giving Oscar worthy performances after a few. Practice makes perfect.
The project for the class itself is nearing completion after I spent re-soldering the new circuit board. The first attempt had too many bugs I had to work out and I screwed a couple of runners up. The second time around the board is much better. I used a better quality perf board ( I will post pics later) I discovered a few tricks I will also share at a later date as I learned there are certain things you can do to make everything easier. Largest is to have a solder sucker on close hand.

Soon all this will end and I will write more

Poster Contest Today

Today is the day I stand before people with lots of letters behind their names and let everyone know about my poster  I'm reviewing non-linear support vector machines at the moment. I'm then going to pick my lovely girl friend run some errands and its off to the contest. The top prize is 1,000 dollars which is more than likely to not end up in my coffers seeing as it is my first time doing this but if I get anything close to an honerable mention I'll be happy.  I will hopefully have a picture or two to display to my one or two loyal readers.