It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Last time I was talking about my senior project, which was a success. The autonomous driving algorithm was a bit tricky to work out, but I don’t mind a challenge. It drew quite a bit of attention when I was testing it in Police car mode, where it drive at full speed for about 10ft with lights and sirens on, then makes a hard turn to one side and does a donut. Since the project was started by one of Purdue’s professors, and they picked up the tab for it, they kept the project and are using it for recruiting during tours of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. That just about wraps up my time at Purdue, the did let me graduate, and I celebrated with a few friends right afterwards with a fountain run. Yes, that’s right, I ran through the Engineering Fountain in cap and gown. We finished up the night with the traditional trip to Steak ‘n Shake.
Since then, I’ve been working in controls engineering. The job entails everything from design, to installation and service. I’ve got to select parts, be it motors, sensors, fuses, relays that are appropriate for the task at hand. Then draw up the schematics to integrate them into the machine. Next, I write the program that runs the machine, making the right motions happen at the right time to build a particular part. That all happens at our shop. Then, once the customer approves the machine’s function, I’ll travel with it to their site and set it up again on their floor. This often includes some electrical wiring, and adjusting the program to their specifications after they get used to running the machine for a while.
The travel has been quite fun. There are some days were I’ll be asked at 1 in the afternoon, “Can you be in Buffalo at 7 tomorrow morning?” I don’t mind this one bit. I’m often going to work on a machine that I haven’t seen before, so before I can fix it, I first have to figure out exactly what it should be doing and why it’s not. I’ve traveled from Maryland to Texas, Canada to South Carolina spending 36 nights on the road last year. This has worked quite well for photography that I’ve gotten into recently.
A roommate that I had in college was the photo editor for Purdue’s newspaper, which is where I got my interest in photography. Since I’ve been working, I’ve been able to afford more expensive toys. I got myself a new car not too long after starting work, and picked up a digital SLR about 6 months ago. I’ve had a great time photographing things such as high school football games, marching bands, the Chicago Auto Show, and family and friends during the holidays. One of my favorites was Niagara falls, just a few weeks after I got my camera. It was essentially a free trip for me, since I was in Buffalo for work. It took some trial and error, but I managed to get some excellent photos of it. Since then I’ve learned a lot about photography. You can see all of my photos in the Photos section of this site.
PDF Creator is an open source tool you can use to create PDF files. Using it is simple enough, it installs itself as a printer driver, so all you need to do to is change your printer in the print dialog box of any windows program.
I often use it as a print preview for programs that don’t have one built in.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is comparable to Photoshop. By no means is it a drop in replacement. But a lot of the core functionality is there, including layers, filters, plugins, paths and channels. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially because the majority of tutorials on image editing are based on Photoshop. But with a lilttle legwork you can find the comparable features and create the same effects in GIMP without the price tag of Photoshop.
Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large video outputs for various formats. It also has presets for various media players such as an Ipod.
I’ve have yet to find a format that it can’t work with, and have had great success creating videos for use on my 5th generation Ipod and my Motorola E815m.
Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.
Once you’ve got things tagged and organized, the search function lets you quickly find any images within Picasa. There’s some simple editing and tuning tools, one of which is “I’m feeling lucky.” From a technical standpoint it’s a level adjustment algorithm, but like a Google search by the same name, it almost always makes the photo look better.
It’s integrated with Picasa Web Albums, so you can publish your photos online. Picasa is also integrated with various on-line photo finishers, so you can upload to them directly from the program. Finally, it has tools for creating web pages from a selection of photos, based on a customizable template.