I was in the department this morning when something caught my attention: one of the workstations display the Google webpage. Their logo was made up of LEGO bricks! Later on, Slashdot posted the article about the 50th Anniversary of the LEGO brick. So that was the occassion. LEGO made a significant contribution in my life. Aside from having the toy bricks during childhood, my research career came from a LEGO related project:
- Robotag: The Implementation of a Robotic Kit that Combines Primitive Behavior to Promote Higher Levels of Competence - this was the title of my senior research project in Philippine Science High School. It brought me to places like the Intel Philippine Science Fair. I enjoyed meeting from around the Philippines and some of which I met during college.
- My project gave me enough experience to be a facilitator for PSHS-SEI (Science Education Institute) robotics workshop. It was a summer workshop for science teachers around the Philippine to prepare them for teaching a robotics elective in their respective high schools. The government gave away LEGO Mindstorms kits to each school. This was also my first paycheck as a “professional”!
- I was invited to give a talk on mechanical design of robots using LEGO bricks. It was an introductory workshop for high school teachers to prepare for the Philippine Robot Olympiad. The event was sponsored by Felta, Inc. the distributor of LEGO Dacta, the educational kit version of the Mindstorms system. The PSHS-SEI robotics program on the other hand used the commercial editions of the set distributed by Giftgate.
Here is my presentation on mechanical design a few years back. I discussed different types of joints and elaborated on the weakness and stress of the different types. It was basically a vector mechanics lecture using LEGO bricks for visualization. Additional slides are included elaborating on documenting your creations using LEGO cad software like MLCad and ldraw.
Technorati Tags: lego, mindstorms, bricks
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PhD Comics has posted a good webcomic about research:
In the ECCE department, we call this faculty-driven research! How did you get your research topic?
Since we are nearing campus recruitment in Ateneo, I would like to encourage incoming freshmen college students to join the department. Get your feet wet working on cutting-edge technologies the continuously strives to solve the complex problems of the world today! For admission information, please visit the AdMU admissions office (OAA).
Technorati Tags: recruitment, research, ateneo, ecce
Weather satellite imagery from PAGASA
This was posted in Inquirer.net regions section a week ago:
At least 13 digital rain gauges have been installed in seven towns and two cities of the province, and 12 more are coming, courtesy of the Social Action Center of the Archdiocese of Legazpi.
Cedric Daep, executive officer of the Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council, said early warning devices would also be given to communities so that information could be relayed quickly to the residents.
Disaster officials have been trained to interpret data from the wired rain gauges, which cost almost P7,000 each and are placed in municipal halls. The gauges can detect possible landslides, lahar and flooding through a criteria carefully devised by the PDCC.
When the device records rainfall of 1 millimeter per minute, mudflows from Mayon Volcano are likely to occur, Daep said. A 7.2 mm-per-hour rainfall could mean heavy flooding, especially in low-lying areas
Indeed it is more cost effective to deploy an array of sensors across an specific area rather than buying multi-million dollar equipment like weather radars. But in order to obtain useful information in a timely manner, the network for these gauges should be properly designed. There have been a lot of research on deploying highly resilient networks for rain conditions. I am currently involved in the Rain research group of the ECCE department. Aside from studying how rain affects the signals and performance of the rain sensor, our group proposed to use the network itself as the sensor. We are also researching on innovating data gathering methodologies such as using digital recorders (acoustic sensors) as rain observation equipment.
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I have decided to separate my personal (actually it’s more technical and highly niched) blog to my academic pages. The following are the other pages that I maintain:
- Course pages-separating the course page into a more structured manner and editing with low level access allows me more flexibility in terms of organizing content per course. As a non-mouse person (some one who does not like moving the cursor very much), I find coding a few lines of html easier than going all through the menus of Wordpress’ page manager. A snippet of my research interests and publications are also included in the page for people to see what I have been working on for the past few years.
- Research page-As of now, this page basically contains my faculty profile with respect to the ECCE deparment site. I decided to post most of the updates of my research work such as publications, slide presentations here so that the department can easily reorganize content of the entire site. Plus a wiki structure provides facilities for internal groupware collaboration. Thus we can easily fork internal proposals into full-length presentations for public consumption.
Another feature in my research and course pages is the integration of online document and presentation viewers. No need to download the entire presentation for a preview! Most of the presentations in the pages above either came from Google Docs or Zoho Office. I used the prototype AJAX libraries to asynchronously load the presentation on my pages. I hope to give a more pleasurable user experience for people visiting my course and research pages.
I am currently building a new Beowulf cluster using Rocks 4.3. It uses the linux kernel version 2.6.9-55EL. After building the master node, it is time to install on the compute nodes. In normal conditions where everything is smooth, the Rocks kickstart system boots the compute nodes from the network via a dhcp-tftp-kickstart combination. But our Rocks cannot load the network driver. Upon identification of the driver, I downloaded the Realtek 8111B (r8168) from the vendor’s site. I followed the instructions on how to add a custom device driver to the kernel in the rocks documentation. It basically creates an initrd.img file where the kernel modules is installed. But the boot sequence does not load the kernel module properly. I had a couple of email exchanges with Greg Bruno, one of Rock’s developers over the mailing list to diagnose the problem. But building a custom kernel module for the current kernel have not solved the missing module.
Upon further investigation, the driver for my NIC was incorporated into the r8169 module of the vanilla kernel. So I downloaded kernel version 2.6.23.13. First the kernel*.rpm packages must be built and installed in the /home/install rocks repository. Next, the rocks-boot package should be rebuilt in order to incorporate the new kernel. But since Centos uses an older version of the kernel, the hardware id of my NIC is not associated to the r8169 kernel module. So I created a dummy device driver in the rocks-boot repository. In the Makefile, I removed the source file to be compiled and simply added in an entry for my driver in the pcimap.
Now my compute nodes was able to grab the kickstart file and install an entire operating system in 10 minutes!
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