Surfingcat's Blog

This past week was overwhelming, but we made it. We were up all night Thursday finishing the final system. After lots of pizza, doughnuts, and coffee, we eventually decided to put the system into a PlayStation 1 case. So we took it apart and fastened the Fon and HCS08 to it. I then hot glued the NES controller ports as well as the PIR sensor onto the front of the case. I soldered some and connected everything to the microcontroller.

It was very interesting to see all of our work combined into one tiny box. There were a few dangerous moments that involved someone drilling a hole through the buttons on top of the PS1. We have the router's antenna sticking up through that hole. Overall, I think the system looks mighty fine.

This class has by far been the most interesting and invigorating thing that I have ever done in college. It helped me to consider all aspects of product development and design. The course has made me become fully committed to sticking with Electrical Engineering. The sense of community that I felt with everyone was great. Dr. K is very supportive of practical education, and Nick was extremely helpful in teaching me how to learn and discover new things. Steve was the driving force behind getting us all together to do this. I thank all of them, as well as the rest of the team, for being so great. _{Even if Jazzman was hitting on me in the club.}

This was a rough day. Eventually we made it to the conference. The opening ceremony and talk were really good. The vendors had some cool stuff out. Lockpicking was my favorite. This conference was unlike any I had ever been to before. There was lots of intelligence.

After delicious Indian dinner, we went to our hotel, checked in, and set up our mobile lab. Somewhere that night, we got a few hours of sleep.

The day of reckoning. We almost missed the continental breakfast. Afterwards, we started compiling our presentation. This took much longer than I think we had planned, because we didn't get to really practice it. We presented at 16:00. Looking back on things, we could have been a little bit more prepared, but I think that we communicated our overall goal and progress very well. The audience enjoyed Alex's part of the talk the most.

Following the presentation, we realized that we hadn't eaten since breakfast. McDonald's is very convenient.

At 6:30, the Hack or Halo competition started. This was really amazing. Lots of killing in Halo 3 happening at the same time that Steve and Stamat were hacking. There was crazy stuff going on. I don't know most of what they were typing, but I think we should definitely practice so that if there is a next time, we are prepared to win. Congrats to Erin too; she got 3rd overall in Halo.

Check-out happened around noon, and we got to see a couple of talks once we arrived at Shmoo for the day. The closing ceremony was the most violent I've seen. There were Shmoo Balls flying everywhere. They also gave away a lot of cool stuff for raffles and from the booths.

After Big Slice pizza, we tried to leave but the car wouldn't start. I got scared but eventually it was fixed and we left and I was exausted and then we got home.

• code for the passive IR sensor which uses a Keyboard Interrupt to bring the HCS08 out of low power mode so that other things can start to happen
• helped Rob H. and Larry code the HCS08 to transmit/receive commands and status notifications via the com port (which will eventually be wireless via ZigBee)
• learned how to use SVN
• wrote a tutorial for how to use tortoise svn in windows: tortoisesvn
• created a diagram of the entire system
• created a working table of ports and interrupts used in the HCS08 code.
• worked with the crime tracker database extensively, creating a massive script to filter out and clean bad entries that didn't match up to the location names from our coordinate table. learned MySQL and some Python. eventually made a very bad mistake which led to us not completing this portion of the project
  I learned from it though.
• collaborated with Rob H. and Larry to combine all of the firmware code and set it up with the different ports on our CyberHub v0.1. Major help from Nick and Steve thanks
• soldered connections, wired, and hot glued the insides of our “PlayStation” system together.

yay

dinner time:

Looks like it's going to be a long night. I need to work in the PIR code with the system code so that the system wakes up from low power mode via the keyboard interrupt.

I singlehandedly killed Crimetracker by accidentally copying the original location column over our locationClean column in the rawdata table. Sorry

My hope is to redeem myself. Change is what I need. Yes I can.

Treat me as your slave this week. I have no other obligations, so please tell me to help you if you need anything.

Rob H and I started off Tuesday night trying to figure out how to make the ATD conversion code functional. Around 7pm, I was informed that we are giving up on the database and that I am permanently assigned to working on the code for the microcontroller. This fueled me to do better with the coding for the microcontroller.

We figured out the RTI was somehow messing with power for the entire system. Settings were most likely set wrong. We were on a mission to fix things. Steve helped us for a while.. We figured out the timing that we needed for Larry’s code to work, and he got started on setting that up. Rob and I thought for a few minutes that we needed to write another interrupt for ATD, but eventually we decided not to. It was also suggested that we do single ATD conversions instead of continuous. We eventually settled on continuous conversions because they seem more practical and because we were able to figure out how to make them work.

There were some issues with Pull Up Enables, but we don’t think these were the culprits in confusing our code. With Steve’s help, we were able to get started on a solution for ATD.

10:37 yielded a long distance conference call with Nick. Larry, Steve, Rob H, Josh, and I were there. We listened to Nick tell us that this is the final stretch and that we need to have everything integrated and functioning in time for our presentation Saturday.

Nick suggested that since the code overall isn’t very functional that we troubleshoot it in sections. We did just that; we commented out every portion and went through one by one and found the errors. Eventually we pieced together some working ATD code. The main problem seemed to be in the Stop Mode portion of the code.

Rob and I had some issues with which ports to use, but after switching boards, we were able to use the waveform generator to simulate our microphone’s data into the ATD port. With this data, we outputted to the comm. port. This is a very important step that we’ve been needing to accomplish. Hopefully tomorrow all sensors will output to serial comm. and we’ll be able to interface with the router (and ZigBee) successfully.

The image below shows the ASCII representation of the random numbers from the waveform being outputted into HyperTerminal. I changed the “microphone alert” portion of the code to have a lower value just to test that the text “Microphone Danger!!” would appear whenever the test values stayed about a certain level for 25 samples. Pay no mind to how ugly this is, and just see that it works.

After fixing the ATD with Rob, I went through all of the SerialTest code and formatted it all the same. Then I wrote header files for all of the functions and all of the interrupts. Hopefully this was correct. Let me know if it’s not.

• Have a finished product by Thursday.
• Not be so awful at life.

yay

This week I did various things.

I learned to solder from Rob H. We made a cable so that we can interface the HCS08 to the router. I also helped him debug the code and we listened to Nick and got the demo board to work without being tethered to the computer.

I've been working with Josh a lot on the crimetracker database. I wrote a python script that filters out a lot of things that we don't need, and cleaned the rawdata table locations to match the coords table locations, so that we can plot all of the historic data.

To use phpMyAdmin with our mySQL databases, you must first connect to the VPN:

Once you're on the VPN, you can access PHPMyAdmin.

I'm going to focus on creating meaningful plots of the historic crime data during this final week. These graphs will be used during our presentations to describe possible locations for our project to be installed on campus and to show where past crimes have occurred.

Crimetracker is what I’ve been working on the past week.

I’ve also helped out with other various things that people tell me to do.

• Revised the system diagram so that team members are next to their portion of the project.
• Started a port/interrupt table for coders to use.

The Dupont eCalc labs have ArcGIS installed on them. Since Ben Mearns (Lead GIS Consultant for UD) had informed me that this is the program that his predecessor had used to create the georeferenced pdf, I tried out ArcGIS. It is a very complicated program, and after about two hours of experimentation with it, I decided that we wouldn’t be able to easily use it for our geocoding purposes.

I then got us a Google Maps API key for the domain tcb.udarknet.com. I set up a sample map and experimented with what Google Maps can do for a while, and then began to focus on how to get our actual data.

I took Grungy to User Services at Smith, and we met Anita Schwartz. Rodney had suggested that we talk to her about getting the kml from the bluefox server. She informed us that a man named John Callahan had been in charge of that server before he left to work at the Delaware Geological Survey. Following this, we went to the DGS building on Academy Street. They had cool fossils and plants. We signed the guest book and went down the very long hallways to see Mr. Callahan. He informed us that two years ago he had thrown away the bluefox server on which the file had been hosted. Then he said that this entire time the coordinates had been right in front of us, downloading to our computers every single time we visited http://www.udel.edu/visitus. The coordinate data for every building on campus is stored as a javascript file on that page.

We felt very stupid for never even checking that, but we thanked him and went on our way. I quickly downloaded that file and converted it to a .csv file. The file contained four corner coordinates for every building on campus. I added the latitudes and averaged them, and then added the longitudes and averaged them. This was to calculate the center point on every building. I then used afterburn’s python script to import that data into a new table called “coords” in our mysql database. Yay

Rob H. ate all of the pretzels.

I experimented with mysql for a while. It was very exciting. Commands are simple to learn and from what I have seen, mysql is very powerful.

Steve then wrote a script to pull the data from the database and create a kml file that we can view using Google Earth and Google Maps. You can view that here. This is a screenshot:

Steve, Josh, and I have been focusing on how to condense the database. Currently there are redundant locations such as these:

mysql> select distinct location from rawdata where
     > location like "%russell%" order by location;
+------------------------------------------+
| location                                 |
+------------------------------------------+
| Russell (construction site)              | 
| Russell A                                | 
| Russell A (southwest corner)             | 
| Russell A Bike Rack                      | 
| Russell A Bike Rack/331 Delaware Avenue  | 
| Russell A&B (exterior)                   | 
| Russell A/B                              | 
| Russell A/B Commons                      | 
| Russell A/B Firelane                     | 
| Russell A/Gilbert A (grounds in between) | 
| Russell B                                | 
| Russell B (bike rack)                    | 
| Russell B (east side)                    | 
| Russell B (walkway)                      | 
| Russell B Bike Rack                      | 
| Russell C                                | 
| Russell C (bike rack)                    | 
| Russell D                                | 
| Russell D (bike rack)                    | 
| Russell D Bike Rack                      | 
| Russell D Bike Racks                     | 
| Russell D/E                              | 
| Russell Dining Hall                      | 
| Russell Dining Hall Commons              | 
| Russell E                                | 
| Russell E (bike rack)                    | 
| Russell E (bike racks)                   | 
| Russell E Breezeway                      | 
| Russell Gate Lot                         | 
| Russell Loading Dock                     | 
| Russell Lot                              | 
| Russell Parking Lot                      | 
| Russell Visitor Booth                    | 
| Russell Visitor Lot                      | 
+------------------------------------------+
34 rows in set (0.02 sec)

We don’t need all of the statements like these, so we’ll remove them:

(bike rack)
(east side)
(west side)
firelane
(rear of)

We also want to try to make the data as clean as possible – Steve has already started converting / to and, & to and, st. to street, ln. to lane, rd. to road, and ave. to avenue. These are simple corrections. There are other spelling errors in the database that need to be corrected. Fraser Field is really Frazer field (behind the Carpenter Sports Building). We need to convert abbreviations such as CSB, CWT, and CET (Christiana West Tower and Christiana East Tower – thanks Zombie girl) to what they really stand for. More detailed data is better. All of the old Pencader buildings that have been torn down have to be accounted for.

My most interesting query has been this:

mysql> SELECT location, COUNT(*) FROM rawdata
     > GROUP BY location ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC;
| Morris Library                                |      247 | 
| CWT                                           |      229 | 
| CET                                           |      208 | 
| Frazer Field                                  |      172 | 
| 413 Academy Street                            |      166 | 
| TUC                                           |      161 | 
| CSB                                           |      154 | 
| Perkins Garage                                |      138 | 
| Russell Lot                                   |      133 | 

I find it very interesting that the highest crime rate is in our library. The towers are #2 and #3. I think a lot of people get into fights at Frazer Field. 413 Academy Street is UD Public Safety. I guess they bring people there to prosecute them. Don’t park in the Perkins Garage.

I am learning a lot. Steve has been encouraging me to realize that there are people who can help you. User Services and the Delaware Geological Survey are two departments outside of EE that I’ve had to contact this week. Emails and phone calls aren’t always the quickest and most effective ways to get answers. Physically going to see and talk to people yielded the best results this week. We got answers and results.

yay