New computer setup

So i got my new computer, a Dell Studio 17 inch at the beginning of the month. As a result I was also able to connect my new monitor, a 23 inch LG.

Old setup:

*It wasn't exactly there. That's just where I keep it till my dad cleans up his work crib in the basement and is ready to adopt the homeless HP.

New setup:

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Blogs aren't really my thing for now

These few weeks i won't have time to update this, but my Twitter will be updated more, which you can check on the right side.

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DIY digital 3D magnetometer

Finally had the time to put everything together into a nice PDF. Just to remind you, I was not allowed to use micro controllers or interface it to a PC. When you reach the diagram section in the PDF, you will see two of them. Thea reason for this is (you'll know this if you skim over the explanations) that a toroid could only be used to detect the magnetic field on two axis. Hence the first diagram has one drive coil and two sense coils and two display, while the second one has only 1 drive, 1 sense and 1 display. Initially i intended to make it have 3 displays that would show all the axis in real time. When 2 days before the darn thing was due, I failed in printing my own hand made circuit board (the etch-resistant pen was at fault since it wasn't resistant enough), i tried to fix the mistakes through the silver containing conducting paste. Didn't work out. Therefore the design was changed so that we would only use 1 display, which meant hooking up a 3 way switch (3 in, 1 out) or 2 2 way switches(imagine a normal slide switch put in a binary tree  fashion).

There was a way to use only 1 coil, but that involved buying a tall toroid. Unfortunately that had to be custom ordered, and it took to long. that also meant between noise filters had to be developed and i didn't have time to do it.

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Canada vs USA ~ Canada wins

First of all the game. It was unbelievable. It was well plaid, and there almost was a hockey fight, which was expected considering the pressure of the game. 1-0 at the end of the 1st, 2-1 at the end of the second and 2-2 at the end of the 3rd after Team USA scored with 28 seconds left. Who would have thought it was even possible?

Then we went into 20 minutes of sudden death with shoot-outs afterwards if needed. And Sid the Kid won the game. He saved the best for last. Some were complaining about his lack of scores in the 3 previous games. But in this winning play, he pushed and didn't give up. And because Canada won the Hockey gold, Canada won the Olympics.  Of course USA and Germany had more medals (not gold though), but it was the hockey game that decided who really won the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Before Sid's shot, no Canadian dared to think what if the US won. It would have killed our Canadian pride. People would turn in their citizenship and I would not apply for one. The fabric of space and time would have ruptured. This was our sport.

This following article details the true meaning of this game in a way that i could not do without plagiarizing. So here it is:
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/vancouver/ice_hockey/news?slug=jp-hockey022810&prov=yhoo&type=lgns


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Programming project

I've been thinking lately of doing the science fair this year. That depends if i do get time to write the program. What I basically want to do is to create a augmented reality program. The idea is that you will have a camera at the front of a car, which will take a live stream of everything in front of the car. The program will read the license plates and will pull up information about the driver from a database. It won't be name and DOB and that kind of stuff. It will rather be any infractions the person committed, so you would now if the driver in front of you has had a history of DUI or hit and runs. It could also tell you whether the car is stolen or not so the proper law enforcements could be contacted. 

I guess at the end more features can be added. This would include methods to figure out the lights at the intersection for example.

However, there are some problems with my original idea. While for most cars the license plate is clearly visible, there are some cars where the paint is faded. This could be solved by replacing the reading of the license plate with a piece of hardware in each car that would transmit its license plate and all this other info to all the cars around it in a 10m radius. Then the info could be displayed in the corner of an HUD on the windshield. I looked into HUD displays, but something that big seems a bit hard to do. There are some alternatives though. At CES, this year, I think it was Sony that had a laptop with a transparent display. The colors were incredibly vivid for the 40% transparent display. I guess you could put the same thing instead of a windshield. It would definitely occupy a lot less space than an HUD, as for an HUD you need a projector as well.

I think for the purpose of the science fair I will stick to my camera version, and assume that the license plates are visible. Well actually I have no idea, as in order to see the cars in front of you, a high-res picture will be needed, so OCR should take some time on it. This would make everything lag quite a bit, so in the end IF i am to do it, I'll stick to hardware. I haven't thought that much about that, so no idea how i'll realize that in terms of protocols. Bluetooth maybe since most new cars have that anyway? Not sure about the radius of the blue tooth though

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Popular Mechanics links of the Day

Today I found these great articles on PopMech. First one (http://pburl.com/0ef708) deals with robots. It is this month's cover page issue for their magazine. It's brilliantly written, full of interesting information. There is also this idea which keeps bugging me for some time. Why do all of our robots have small motors in them? Why couldn't we instead make their movements happen because of different fibers stretched the same way muscles are? The material would need the property to contract when current is sent through it and TA DAA: more human robots. I know that some scientists in the US are working on these kind of fibers made of carbon nano tubes., but is there any other material or even gizmo that does the same thing so that we could play with it for a while? If it is and if it is relatively cheap, please tell me about it in the comments, as I am very interested buying it, for a miniature robot working on the principle above.

2nd article: http://pburl.com/074d1f. Mr Richard Branson comes up with another great idea. The type that is described best by *face slap*-why-didn't-I-think-of-that? He reached the space, and now he is planning on getting a line of submarines, so people could go deep under the oceans whenever they want to, or on chartered dives through Virgin Seaways.

3rd article deals with Nasa's future. http://pburl.com/050c29. It seems that uber-cool president Obama, did not include any money for the hardware for Nasa's human space flight program in the budget. This raises the following question answered by the article:

• 1) Who are the beneficiaries of this budget shift? 
• 2) Is the military the heir to NASA? 
• 3) Will the U.S. lose the new Space Race? Do people care? 
• 4) What will the next big launch vehicle look like? And when will it be ready? 
• 5) Are NASA astronauts going extinct? 

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Saddest XKCD post

Awwww...

Please go to the website below, and see the mouse over text:
http://xkcd.com/695/

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