Funnily, I titled this day’s thoughts as “At the Races” – particularly because I am in a sense racing towards the finish line with the assignments at hand. I am nearly done with my portfolio to be submitted to the doctorate program at Harvard and PhD program here at MIT. Perhaps I can print early tomorrow morning.
Other than the Portfolio race track, I’m a competitor in the races for finishing my final project for presentation at my Harvard class on Friday. I have designed and partially built a physical device that can learn from my movement of an object – in other words, a robotic wall that mimics the movement of a prototype of that same wall. I’m using the easy arduino microcontroller along with an accelerometer. The microcontroller is the “brain” – it holds onto the written code I gave it and acts upon it, while the accelerometer is an electronic chip that can measure rotation, vibration, and tilt in the x-y axis. I’m only using a dual axis chip, the Mesmic series now excitingly available at Radio Shack for $30. Cheap, but hopefully it’ll get way cheaper.
I gave a small demo to my thesis adviser today, we had good discussion on my thesis direction as well as the direction to which I should investigate for the first chapter of my thesis book.
On a side note, I peeked into my house mail box today and saw a red envelope – Netflix DVD came in! I believe it should be Romancing the Stone (1980s) – as to why I’m interested in seeing this film? Perhaps its because my parents had always seem to talk about it when having funny conversation since I was a kid, this is the time to see what was so funny after all.
