We’re having a girl =D

She's smiling for the cameraWe just had the week 21 ultrasound and learned our baby’s gender. If she looks anything like her mom then I’m not looking forward to when she turns sixteen! LOL – several friends asked me if I’m going to buy the shotgun now or wait until she’s of dating age.

T had her friend Corine do the ultrasound. They met during her first year as a special ed preschool teacher when Corine worked as a paraeducator. Now shes an ultrasound tech. Worked out quite well – and she was very thorough. It looks like we have a healthy little girl. It was amazing hearing her heart beat during the follow-up appointment with the OB a day later.

Now I’ll need to buy me a few shotguns!

Posted by on 20 June 2008 at 8:28 AM

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My Masters Thesis is Finally Done

My MSEE thesis is now complete and I’ve satisfied all of my requirements for graduation from the electrical engineering department. My thesis is entitled “Design of a Reliable Embedded Radio Transceiver Module with Applications to Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Systems“. Well, I guess this concludes my edumahkayshun, and now I gots ta git me a reel job.

Posted by on 19 June 2008 at 11:09 PM

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University of Washington Robofish on You Tube

My lab’s robotic fish are now on You Tube:


This video demonstrates robot fish schooling


Underwater camera view of our fish

The comments on YouTube about this video resmble the same questions and comments we received at our open house demo – especially the one about laser beams. LOL. Two comments were notable though:

ThunderStormV5000 writes:

Robot Fish for president! They have more brains than the current candidates!

Well, at least in the case of His Holiness the Liberal Savior (Barack Obama), I agree. A PowerPC processor clocked at 40 MHz would do a much better job of running our country.

zharbulfin writes:

thats really kewl. the people who made those r geniuses ^^

Yep, I agree with that one too! :D

Posted by on 12 June 2008 at 1:47 AM

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Lots of Media Interest

I found out what happened. Our research was originally detailed in an article at UWeek (the University of Washington’s News Site). This article was started all of the media activity and was quoted at Ocean Lines, EurekAlert!, and Slashdot.

This was followed by a news cast at King 5 (Local News for Seattle).

Our work was also featured at ZDNet and Science Daily. Very cool. Today I learned that the Mumbai Mirror also wrote an article. In the Mumbai article, we’re referred to as “boffins” – apparently British slang for “scientists”.

All of this activity isn’t surprising – robots are cool. Robotic fish are even cooler. We’ll be doing some more demos for reporters wanting to show video of coordinated maneuvering of the robotic fish. When this is posted, I’ll let you know

Posted by on 9 June 2008 at 10:24 PM

Filed Under: News & Events, Research

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ZDNet Article on the Fish

Located here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=945

Posted by on 9 June 2008 at 2:03 AM

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Robot Fish on King 5 News

My lab’s work was featured on our local Seattle News station. I designed the radio transceivers that the robotic fish use (you can see a green wire antenna sticking out of them while they swim). Ben designed the actual fish and its unique swimming mechanism (fin actuation). He’s got a sweet CAD model that I’m using in my thesis. Dan built the camera tracking system featured in the broadcast. We used that tracking system to enable autonomous swimming for our open house demonstration that I described a few posts ago.

Video here: King 5 Video on Demand

Posted by on 8 June 2008 at 1:06 AM

Filed Under: News & Events, Research

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Internet Black Holes (the invisible /dev/null beast)

The University of Washington has some great ongoing research projects. This one made national news at MSNBC (article: here). The Internet’s backbone consists of many thousands of routers speaking the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP was designed at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to allow network traffic to take multiple routes to a destination. This provides for communication if one or more of the routers fails – a likely scenario in the event of a nuclear war. Because destinations can be reached though multiple routes, each individual path may or may not link to its destination. If it doesn’t link, any traffic that uses that route gets lost, forever. Never before have these ‘bad routes’ been charted. The CS department developed a tool to search for and track these black holes and they affectionately called it UW Hubble.

Check it out: http://hubble.cs.washington.edu

Posted by on 8 May 2008 at 3:40 AM

Filed Under: Computing, Networking, Research

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While Installing Gentoo Linux I Erased My Windows NTFS Partition

I’ve been using Ubuntu for my desktop OS and my labmates finally convinced me to replace it with Gentoo. They are heavily in favor of the Portage package management system and Ben spent some time earlier today showing me the coolness of Gentoo. I returned convinced of its superiority and was determined to have it installed on my system by the evening.

Got the installer live CD, fired it up and did an incredibly stupid thing – I used the partitioning util that comes with Gentoo to configure THE WRONG DRIVE. Yes, I killed the partition table of my windows partition thinking it was a different disk where I wanted to install Gentoo.

Fortunately I found a kick-ass util called TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org. The great thing about this program is that it can scan for lost partition data and restore it. In the case of NTFS its a bit more complicated because this filesystem has two boot sectors – a primary one and a back-up located elsewhere on the drive. If there is a mismatch the filesystem will be unreadable. This was the case for me and I just figured it out and restored my Windows drive! Phew… my thesis is on that drive and its not done yet!!!

Posted by on 30 April 2008 at 4:51 AM

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Robotic Fish at the UW Engineering Open House

Close up swimming fishMy lab hosted another successful engineering open house exhibit today at the University of Washington. I’ve been working in the Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab at UW for two years now and I’m close to completing my masters degree. My thesis is based on a radio transceiver that I specifically designed to enable underwater communication between our three robotic fish. Today, my transceiver was used to demo our work to the UW community and visitors to the university. [Read more…]

Posted by on 25 April 2008 at 7:17 PM

Filed Under: Engineering, Research

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Delicious Dinner

I cooked an incredibly yummy pizza tonight. Simple to make: just a large, thin-crust Boboli. Topped with cream cheese, pesto, tomatoes, mushrooms, black olives, bell pepper slices and avocado slices. Just ten minutes of baking at 450 degrees Fahrenheit (232 degrees Celsius) and add the tomatoes and avocados after it comes out of the oven. I’m going to try making it next with sun dried tomato pesto and maybe multi colored bell peppers.

Pizza

Posted by on 14 April 2008 at 11:16 PM

Filed Under: Cooking, Interests

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