Arduino Struggles

After several periods of a bug presenting itself in the arduino, I finally sat down to try to get rid of it the other day. It seemed that at completely random points the heat sensor would fail and read hiccup and either output something incomprehensible, or out put a ridiculously high temperature, either of which would make the entire system take a few seconds to shut down and restart. I had noticed that this tended to happen a lot more after we had been running the system for 50 minutes than when we ran it from a cold start, so I suspected the actual heat of the system did have something to do with it.

I tried to program checks that would replace clearly wrong readings with more reasonable ones. This worked to an extent, giving the system up to ten minutes of uninterrupted running. However, I still found that when I heated it up to higher and higher temperatures it would fail more often, completely ignoring my failsafes.

I began to suspect that the problem wasn't with the heat sensor, but rather with the motor itself, as the problem was showing up when it got close to full power. To test this I changed the temperature for max power from 40 C to 60 C and found that the problem had very nearly disappeared. I could get the sensor as hot as I did before without the problem showing up.

What lead us to falsely believe that the problem was the fault of the temperature sensor is that the sensor does in fact have hiccups where it picks up temperatures much too high or much too low. This may still contribute to the problem, but with the expanded temperature range it rarely presents itself and should work well in the presentation. There is also hope that since we will be using a different motor, the problem may disappear entirely if the hardware can handle high power settings better than the one that we were provided with.

Chicago - Part 4

After staying the night with Jono, we ate breakfast and hung out for a little before heading out to the train station. On the way we passed by Obama's house which was barricaded like a fortress, as was the synagogue across the street from his house...

Once we got downtown we walked past the Sears Tower and overheard a kid excitedly telling his parents that there wasn't a long line to go to the top of the Willis Tower. What a sad world this boy lives in, where the most he can get excited for is going up the Willis Tower, the tallest building in the city, and a shadow of its former self. I remember the grand old days of the 90's in which I would get excited for going up to the top of the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world.

I said goodbye to Jono and boarded the train for my very first train ride in the United States. It was very nice, but seemed rather slow. And though we continued to plod on at a constant pace down towards Champaign with very few delays, somehow the train managed to pull into the station half an hour late. This rather confuses me, as the bullet trains going all across Japan were totally on time. Clearly we need a batter train system here. It was actually a very nice ride. Much better than taking a bus or car.

Given that the sun has taken to setting that the ridiculously early hour of 4:00 PM as of late, pretty much the entire train ride was in the pith black of night. And it really was pitch black out the window. I had to take it on good faith that the universe outside the train still existed. A few texts helped convince me of that.

Chicago - Part 3

At 3:00 we left the Art Institute to meet the rest of the group before they all went over to the train station for the ride back down to Champaign. Here I said goodbye to the group, as I was staying another 24 hours.

I then called up my friend Lauren to come meet me. After about 15 minutes of waiting in front of the Art Institute I was abducted by two men in spectacles with large noses and funny mustaches. They took me back to Lauren's apartment where I changed into normal clothes, met her roommates and neighbor, we ate pretzels and watched half of Cool Runnings on a VHS intended only for advertisement to retailers.

Around five my two other friends, Rachel and Andrew showed up, and Lauren and I went with them to get dinner. At dinner I finally learned what this famous "Chicago Deep Dish Pizza" is, and I admit that it was very good, but far too much for me to eat.

We discussed the obscene number of Walgreens and Starbucks in Chicago and came across "gang signs" before heading back to Lauren's apartment. There we were given healthy doses of Aaron Eckhart and Taylor Swift, BS was called, doors were named Dumble, hair was braided and we briefly Skyped with Jeremy. The internet was out at the apartment and Lauren had to sit against a wall to steal wireless from across the street. It was kind of strange being in such a big city, with so many people around, and in a sense being cut off from so much.

At a certain point we said goodbye to Lauren and headed over to UChicago where I was given the grand tour. I must say it all gave me a very Hogwarts vibe. Both in size and architecture. Very different from the U of I. Completely randomly during the grad tour we ran into two more people we know from high school, Hannah and Elaine. It was rather strange actually, especially given that Andrew said he hadn't seen them in months. In fact, it reminded me of Hannah's graduation speech, in which she compared high school to a TV show, and said that all the people from our school going off to UChicago is a lot like a spinoff show. I was totally feeling that, and feeling like a guest star from the old show. Weird. Later Rachel got a text from Elaine of another one of our classmates at a party, meaning that I saw all but one of the people from my class that went to UChicago. We hung out for a little longer and discovered that one of our classmates had apparently been written out of the U of I spinoff without our knowledge. Eventually Rachel and Andrew took me over to my friend Jono's apartment, where I was staying the night, and we said goodbye.

There is a hidden iFoundry connection in this post. If you know what it is, you win!

Chicago - Part 2

After the presentations at SOM finished we headed down to the lobby of the building to check out an awesome model of Chicago.

It was super cool and I totally want to play Godzilla with it.

We then all headed across the street to Millennium Park to visit the Bean and decide how to spend the next hour or two before the group had to head over to the train station.

From there the group split up. Some people went to the water tower, while Jeremy, Claire and I went over to the Art Institute of Chicago. There we explored the new Modern Wing of the museum. And by explore I mean spend the entire time on a single floor. There was so much cool stuff there and it was huge. The floor we were on only covered modern European art 1900-1950 but that was more than enough to wow us and take up the hour we had there. I was especially excited to see some famous Magritte paintings and one of Salvador Dali's awesome flaming giraffes in real life. We had so much fun there and all felt like we could have spent days exploring the museum.

Chicago - Part 1

On Friday, November 13th I joined several of my fellow members of Art and Engineering Design on a trip up to Chicago to visit the downtown offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architecture firm involved in buildings such as the Sears (not Willis) Tower, Trump Tower, and the ridiculous Burj Dubai. They had invited our group up for a day of talks about various aspects of the company, and I, with an amateur interest in huge skyscrapers, the sense that I should be more involved in AED events, and an interest in going up to Chicago, agreed to take part in the trip.

I got to the train station in Champaign at 6:45 to get my ticket and meet up with the rest of the group and boarded the Greyhound at 7:10 for an uneventful ride up.

We pulled into the Greyhound station in Chicago and bought a pass for the subway, which we took most of the way to the SOM offices, which are located on Michigan Avenue. We walked the remaining few blocks and arrived at the super classy offices in time for our scheduled arrival at 10:00.

Once we arrived at the offices were were given a quick tour, an explanation of the different departments in the company, and shown examples of different projects that SOM had been involved in.

Once this was over we were taken to a conference room where we listened to three in depth talks about various aspects of the company and designing buildings, all of which proved to be very interesting.

The first talk was about optimizing the design of buildings from a structural standpoint. Math and engineering were at the forefront, and the implication was that building design is first and foremost based on these mathematical designs, and the architects only tinker a little bit to create the desired aesthetic. I'm sure that not quite enough credit was given to the architects here, but given the natural beauty of the mathematical based models, it wasn't too hard to believe that they took the forefront in design. This talk ended up giving me the impression that most professions that at all involve math are filled with people who think that the golden ratio is pretty much the coolest thing ever. In this case, optimized building designs were based on the logarithmic spiral. This means that designs for new buildings are easily distinguishable from older buildings. Old buildings tend to be boring, unnatural and ugly boxes, while new buildings have an organic quality to them, being much more filled with curves, which also makes them much more appealing to the eye.

The second talk was about designing sustainable buildings and what that means. SOM has an internal standard that all of the new buildings it designs will be at least "lightly green." Different examples of sustainable buildings were given, from allowing comfortable work in a desert environment to designing a building to have zero emissions. It was discussed how there are two popular trends in buildings these days that are at odds with each other, and which most clients want. First, they want their buildings to be energy efficient, to be green, to even be certified as such. They also want their buildings to have a sexy all-glass exterior. This however means that a lot of energy will lost. In more temperate climates it is possible to have an energy efficient building that is all glass, though more difficult than one that isn't all glass. However, in hotter regions, such as southeast asia and the middle east it is simply impossible to make a green building in the same style.

Finally, we were given a talk about what SOM's Black Box group does. As a Computer Science major I wasn't expecting anything in these presentations to be relevant to my major, but to my surprise what the Black Box group is doing is completely relevant, and pretty awesome to boot. What the group does is solve various building, architecture and city planning problems with various computer models. One of the coolest methods they utilize is called genetic algorithms, in which they describe an object with a sequence of numbers. Each number represents an aspect of the object, and together, the sequence makes a sort of DNA for the specific instance of the object. Many random objects of the same type, but with different numerical values are generated and grouped together to form a "generation" for the object. Then the entire generation is put through a simulation to see how well each object performs. There will be a specific goal or two in mind: light let in a window, material used, surface area the sun shines on, etc. Some of the objects will perform better than others. The top 10% or so of a generation will be allowed to move on to and help create the next generation. Some of the next generation will come about through random mutations of the survivors' genetic code, and others will come about by combining the code of two survivors, simulating mating. This process will continue for many generations until the objects seem to converge on an optimal design.

I find this all extremely cool, and the fact that there is a strong computer science element even here makes me feel as if I could go into almost any field with a Computer Science degree, as almost everything uses computers these days.