Happy New Year

It's been a while...

In the latest exciting news, our Cap Kart paper entitled - ready for this? - "A Simple Series Battery/Ultracapacitor Drive System for Light Vehicles and Educational Demonstration," was accepted for presentation at the 2009 Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER '09) conference in Monaco. Ridiculous title aside, it was a fun paper to write; if you'd told me last year that my first real publication as a graduate student (or ever) would come from this project, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

Cynical Shane would like to point out that this project, now accepted as real research by more than just me, was done quickly, simply, and inexpensively. Not that it was easy. In fact, there were more times during this project than ever before that I've felt overwhelmed by technical difficulties. But it stayed on schedule and on budget the whole way, and produced real experimental data from an actual physical piece of hardware. Which is more than I can say for some other projects I've been involved with recently.

Good Shane says: Look at that view! I'm happy and proud for the team that an idea which I knew was a good one has made it this far. I can't wait for the trip, which falls during my spring break, and the chance to see some other really cool projects in the field. It'll give me something to look forward during the Boston winter months.

All that's left to do now is dismantle the spinning disks of doom, which have somehow served their purpose without killing anyone, and get the kart out to the track some time when it stops snowing. (May?) Plenty of stuff to keep me busy in the meantime. Happy 2009.

We waited...

My Advanced Dynamics and Controls class was supposed to have a final this morning, but nobody showed up to administer it. The Prof was out of town, his secretary was not in, and the TA was MIA. After a while we decided to leave...but we did leave a note:


Kalman filter that.

Camera Purge

One of the benefits of having a video camera with a 30GB hard drive is that you can store 7 hours of video, but that also means that people leave a lot of raw video on it. (I say "people" because it's been a while since I've actually shot video with my own camera.) So to test my video converter and new computer, I took some of the left over clips from the Cap Kart project and clipped them together.

If you were wondering what NASA-like engineering procedures are employed in my summer projects, these should clear things up. Happy Thanksgiving!

New Machine

You know that part in Apollo 13 where they finally shut down the command module and transfer all control to the LEM? That's what it felt like to move all my stuff to a new laptop. In any case, it's done.

The End of an Era

Yesterday, I decided that the era of the Dell Latitude D800 that I've run into the ground since June of 2004 was over. I am a mechanical engineer, and relatively critical of the computer-savvy in general, so for me to define an era by my laptop says something, I think. Maybe it's a symbolic gesture and a sign that I'm eager to come to terms with other changes, with a new role as a graduate student, with the fact that I honestly forgot my brother's age this week. In any case, I thought I should say a few words...

Not that the D800 is dead; in fact, I'm writing this post with it. My new laptop (a Latitude E6400, since this one outlasted the entire D generation) won't be here for some weeks and I'm sure this one will survive way past then. Once, I was riding a train with this laptop out and tried to pour myself a drink, only to have a bumpy northeast corridor rail cause me to spill it into the keyboard. Once, I left my window wide open to cool down my room while I went to take a shower and a freak thunderstorm soaked everything on my desk, including this laptop. Once, I tripped on the power cord and pulled this laptop off a table, causing it to fall on its corner on the concrete floor of a machine shop. The plastic is cracked, the hinges are shot, and the latch has been replaced with a piece of duct tape; but it still starts up quickly, all 1920x1200 pixels still work, and it still eats SolidWorks files for breakfast. If I had a dollar for every time this laptop has gotten either me or somebody else out of a jam by virtue of its uncompromising functionality, I'd be able to afford a much fancier successor.

More importantly, though, it is a digital archive of the last 54 months of "me," my entire undergraduate career and more. It's spanned so many of my endeavors, including the birth of some new traditions: the "crazy summer project," the "long-weekend-coding-project," and the "media machine." The experiences and people it's seen have changed my life and the media it's captured and stored are priceless to me. Even if I am (poorly) disguising my acceptance of change on many fronts with this new "flagship tool," I'm going to use the resilience of my old machine as a symbol for the many things I want to carry over in the process.

30,000 Words per Second

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, it follows that video is worth roughly 30,000 words per second, right? (Which means that my S.B. thesis could have been summarized with approximately 7/10ths of a second of well-thought-out video.) I have been capturing my projects on video since I got my first DV camera in 11th grade. Short of a live demonstration, it's really the best way to show somebody what I've been working on. In fact, contrary to the rumors that I have turned into an Apple fanatic, the main reason I bought an iPod Touch is because I can now show people my pictures and video without taking out my laptop. That, and episodes of House look better on it than on TV.

But there are so many video formats: MPEG-2 from my camera, MOV and MPEG4 for iTunes, H.264, WMV for editing and showing my Windows friends. And occassionally I like to edit frame-by-frame with my own software. I have fought with codecs for years and previously used at least three different third-party tools to do video conversion. No more! The long weekend inspired me to take on one of my rare pure-software projects. (Last time this happened, I wrote a program to create photomosaics.) I think there is still a CS person hiding in the back of my head. Anyway, I present SCV, which, if you want, stands for "Shane Converts Video."


It's an MPlayer/MEncoder front-end. MEncoder is a great piece of software that was suggested to me for my video editing needs since it can convert between virtually any format. The one downside, for me anyway, was that it is made for/by Linux losers with nothing better to do than run things from the command line. Hear me out: In the 21st century, we have GUIs. So this simple VB (yes, VB) program takes care of all the command line switching and lets me get on with my life.

Ooooooh, code. It can handle the formats I work with most often (WMV, MPEG) in different flavors (AVI, MP4). It can actually make video that works on an iPod. It can both extract frames to JPEGs and recombine JPEG folders into video. It can trim clips. And it can strip/merge audio. I'm sure there's tons more I could do with it, but that's all I need and my software projects are pretty much driven by necessity. If you want to play around with the source or somehow think the executable will actually run on your machine (needs .NET Framwork 2.0 and a working version of MPlayer, at least), here they are:

http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/scv.zip
http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/scv.exe

And if you want to see why I spent part of a four day weekend coding, check out my TechTV collection:

http://scolton.techtv.mit.edu

Take a Lesson from Jesse James

Wow, this is starting to turn into a Discovery Channel show blog. I promise the next few posts will have nothing to do with Discovery. But I had to get this one out: Last week's episode of Prototype This was pretty cool in that the team finally admitted defeat after they tried fairly unsuccessfully to make a 6-legged walking vehicle. It's much better than pretending that everything always works out okay, even when things seem impossible at 12AM on the night before the deadline. But, I have a suggestion for the prototypers on how to deal with prototype failures, which comes from a show the precedes theirs by quite a bit, and here it is:



I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail on why they failed instead of just blaming the overweight chassis. But I caught enough hints in the video and dialog that I think I get it: First, these suck. They finally switched to something like a Sevcon MillipaK for motor control. Of course it's hard to blame the components when the designers have an infinite supply of money. Try doing 300A DC motor control on a real budget. Also, they bought some fancy batteries, but in the last few minutes you can see they gave up and are using lead-acids. And they very briefly mention "optically isolated" controls being an important fix. I'm pretty sure that all this points to massively large loads - far larger than they expected - which demolished the electronics system. Sounds familiar.