Service Learning Week 4 - Capstone Ideas

Capstone Ideas

The main assignment for this week was to come up with some capstone project ideas. I lucked out because I try to keep a good buffer full of project ideas like this. The difference of course is that I generally don't complete them because I am jumping around from one thing to the next learning new techniques and only working on larger projects at work. So what are my 3 main ideas?

1) Mesh networking solar garden light: I have played around turning jars into mesh networks before but never finished a solid garden light. So this project would be turning my concepts in to reality making a high end garden light.

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2) Multi-sample colorimeter: This device would shine light through tubes of liquids and measure how much of a given wavelength is absorbed. It isn't quite a spectrometer, but is a simple useful device for measuring samples of fish tank water for ammonia, nitrate, and nitrite. The icing on this project cake is that it would have wifi or bluetooth to log the data through your phone or home network (undecided) and hold multiple samples. So each colorimeter in the array would be used for a dedicated sample like ammonia measurements. Then you can shake up each vial and put them in their dedicated slot for sample measurement after the sample settle and changes color. 

Example open source colorimeter by IO Rodeo

3) Mobile application for partkeeper inventory software: Partkeeper is the best open source inventory management software I have come across. It isn't a manufacturing resource planning software. It also isn't an enterprise resource planning software. It is an inventory management software. This is a key distinction because a lot of the web based solutions to this problem are offered as "software as a service" with a monthly fee and have way too many features. For managing labs like I am interested in that is excessive and distracting. My interest is making sure that we have the proper components in stock and that we have a reference component list for generating new designs. 

The part that is missing from PartKeepr is a mobile application for rapid inventory assessment which would be my project. Finger worn, battery powered wireless barcode scanners like the RS507 are available to interface with a smart phone via bluetooth for taking quick stock. This kind of application would allow for workload segmentation by dividing ordering and stock assessment between different individuals. As things are now generally a lab manager will take inventory and restock parts in a tedious process. This process should be streamlined to include wearable and smart phone technology.

RS507 finger worn bluetooth barcode scanner for rapid aquisition of product identification codes

 Other news

In other news we continue to learn about social justice through a steady workload of reading and videos. In this area I think the primary way I can make a contribution is through assisting others with technological skill development. On a day to day basis that consists of short conversations where I give others key information required to continue their skill development. These conversations can also include quick tutorials where I show people how to do things like design simple parts in 3d CAD software like SolidWorks. By getting people in the door designing very simple mechanical components or printed circuit boards they can kickstart their learning and get in the game.

Service Learning Week 4 - Just figure it out

Project Management

This weeks key question as part of the service learning class is regarding project management. My background in project management is focused on engineering and gardening. They might seem like very different areas but they have a lot in common. In gardening when I move to a new home the first thing to settle is my fruit trees since they will take the longest. Then I plant my berries so they can reach out and grow into large bushes that produce year after year. Finally come the vegetables, since their lives are measured in weeks.

For a hardware engineering project, using a firmware download station as an example, you want to verify functionality as soon as possible. This means requesting a sample printed circuit board assembly ASAP. Without a sample board you are going to be out of luck, and who knows where that is in manufacturing. People can also be busy and slow to respond so critical human interactions should be loaded to the front of the que. Then you can begin your fixture development based on the presumed correct PCB layout files. A repetitive cycle of e-mails should be sent of course to ensure you get the physical components you need from the PCB designers. Then you begin your 3d prints while still working on your fixture design so you can make sure everything works with a sample board you get. From there on it should be smooth sailing because you have front loaded the critical tasks and verified your design meets the requirements with prototype components.

Then of course if you are a project management professional you can spin several plates (projects) above your head on tall sticks all at once! The end result of successful project management being a peaceful work environment where the critical problems are loaded to the front and available technical and personnel resources are utilized efficiently.

Service Learning Project This Week

Why the title "just figure it out"? This is a classic saying that I have always told my friend, a bit to their frustration. It's true though, you can just figure it out. Computers and electronics are designed by people so they make sense. You may not understand it at the beginning of a problem but you can absorb it. That means if you just remain calm and work at it bit by bit your odds are pretty good at solving your problem whatever it may be. 

Take the LPX-600 3d scanner by Roland found at Monterey Penninsula College (or even the LPX-60) for an example. This scanner "does not support" 64 bit windows 7, windows 8, windows 10, anything past windows XP it looks like. Reading that is pretty frustrating if you'd like to use it with a newer computer! So relax, think for a second. What does it mean that this scanner is not supported under these operating systems? I tried installing the control software and that installed fine. What didn't work was the drivers. So you can look on the internet and download a virus from some Russian website, or look in the drivers folder and see what it really is. It turns out that this device uses drivers that are made for a FTDI communications chip. Conveniently enough they even still update these drivers.

With new FTDI Virtual COM port drivers the only thing you need to do is copy a few lines from the drivers supplied by Roland to add the device information to the new driver information file.[Instructions on github soon] Then you can use the device under windows 7 64 bit and probably newer operating systems supported by FTDI as well. 

Overall my point is that people need to relax, think things through for a second, and keep moving up stream. Maybe there is a Linux version of the software that solves your problem? Maybe you can figure out what chip is inside a machine that you are actually talking to? Whatever the problem is if you don't freak out and just keep at it you can figure out any problem that you need to. 

Service Learning Week 3 - Geometry for manufacturing from 3d scans

A common problem with 3d scanning is that the geometry you get from it isn't great for manufacturing. 3d scanners generate a cloud of individual measurement points which are converted into a mesh of triangles. That's all fine and dandy if you want to 3d print a part or render it in a computer generated scene, but what if you want to generate some real parametric design files that you can modify easily in a program like SolidWorks? Also what if you want to prepare the models for manufacturing on a 2.5 or 3 axis milling machine? Well that's the topic for this week.

The solution comes in reverse engineering software like Geomagic which Monterey Penninsula College are currently evaluating. Geomagic mixes aspects of 3d scanning software with aspects of CAD software like Solidworks to allow for easy tracing of models. That converts them from a cloud of points or mesh of triangles to a clean structure of shapes like circles with defined radii, fillets, and other parameters that are easy to modify.

To see what this kind of workflow might be like I setup a trial version of geomagic on a PC at MPC. Then I scanned an old pulley with their high end roland 3d scanner. This point cloud and incomplete mesh was imported in to Geomagic which allows you to perform operations to close gaps, smooth bumps, and trim excess data from the raw scans. With that work complete you get a finalized sealed up mesh which can be used for tracing.

Tracing the general pulley shape from the side created a new model of the pulley which is the kind of geometry you need for regular CAD programs that are for mechanical engineering instead of art/sculpture. The pulley could then be imported in to a large assembly, modified to fit different belts or shafts, and manufactured with CAM software. Overall Geomagic provides a great solution for converting these kinds of models and I look forward to examining the software more and providing a purchase recommendation to the school. 

Service Learning Week 2 - It's go time

Service Learning Week 2 - It's go time

Lights, cameras, and action...these are all things that will be found in my upcoming documentary. Also to be featured are lasers. Some of these lasers will cut things, some will convert physical objects into 3d files on a computer, and some will turn liquid in to solid forms. That's for the future of this class though. This kind of a blog post should really start with the present or the past. 

So what was this week about? Well I went to MPC and checked out all their equipment. After spending a good amount of time going back and forth between "wow this is crazy" to "man you guys are really going places" we settled down. With the excitement at a manageable level we commenced with assembling and testing their new stereo-lithographic Form2 3d printer. Then we downloaded some parts and send the printer off on it's way for a 5 hour print. This part was quick because we have had several Form printers at my work which make great fixture components. 

With the printer running at full steam shooting a laser into a box filled with a liquid resin to harden it I jumped on the vinyl cutter. This machine had some driver issues which were quickly resolved. Then I learned about all the things you can do wrong when operating the machine. This led to eventual success with a fully setup machine loaded with blue vinyl and ready to cut out some pokemon logos. The key learning take away from this process is that computer controlled vinyl cutters let you make very large quantities of stickers for very cheap quickly. They are also ultra simple to operate after you make the first few mistakes. 

Aside from awesome machines there was a bit of paperwork for the class. I don't mind this paperwork though because it is not as rigid as other classes. It is a lot of reflection about your understanding of the world, how you fit into it, etc so that you can help make it a better place. If it was more rigid I would be a bit out of luck because that hasn't worked out for me traditionally. So thanks to the people involved in structuring this! I'm pretty sure you are the only people that will read this post so have a good week as well. 

Service Learning Week 1 - Getting everything in place

Week 1 - Getting everything in place

At the beginning of this week I thought I was doomed because my service opportunity was agreed upon but the details weren't really fleshed out. A few text messages with my friend and everything was locked down though. Monterey Peninsula College has lots of work to do setting up new equipment and software to get ready for the fall. I'll try to be there once a week because it is a long drive to get there from my house. When Saturday is not an option for my service learning partner then I can take time off work. Overall this is great though and basically what I have been doing for many years. Selecting equipment, purchasing it, installing it, learning it, training others on it, and integrating it into peoples work flows is awesome. Adding new capabilities to this community college will have a long lasting impact on the community. 

With the stress of figuring out my service opportunity melting away into excitement of machinery there was another interesting aspect of this weeks assignments. The other fun assignment I had was to write about the history of my family and technology.  To do this I went to my parents house and sat out on their patio with them. We started at the beginning with my dads first computer, through our first e-mail, and up to my collection of manufacturing robots. It was a really great experience. Combined with our weekly reading though it made me really appreciate my life. I have had a uniquely consistent opportunity to learn and use high end technologies before most people know they exist. This has shaped me as a person and I hope to continue to share the skills I have collected with others.

Intro to database week 6 - querious questions

Week 6 - querious questions

This week we went back to SQL with full steam. There were your run of the mill MIN() and MAX() type queries, but also a lot of sub-queries that took me a bit to figure out. The syntax that SQL wants for sub queries threw me off a bit but it seems like you can really do a lot stringing things together. You can also write things that may seem nice to you but turn out to look absolutely terrible. So the big take away for me was to not make a mess, like with any software project. Nobody cares how smart you think and clever you think you are if your query, script, program, whatever looks like junk. It's just not useful. 

Here is an example from the homework that I like, for figuring out who the best student was in a given course code. 

You could write that query a lot of ways, including one giant line that is a big hassle to read. But as written above it is clear what is going on. We are interested in the last name of the student we will call the best student. Their name is in the student table but the grades are in the enrollment table so we will join those tables together. The unique identifier of interest is the student number so use that for the "on" condition. To round it all out we are looking for the best grade, that's where the sub-query formatting comes in. It is broken into "where a > b" but we can expand the b part out by putting parenthesis around it. That lets us chill out and start over from the beginning with a query that figures out what the max grade was for class # 10014. When it all runs then we end up with the student with the highest grade from class 10014. 

I still don't know what I'm doing as far as SQL goes but at least I know what to look for and the structure of it. To really be able to get much done I think you need a lot of weeks of repetition on real world problems where you fiddle around for a while. It is clear that sub-queries really let you start doing useful work instead of just finding simple pieces of information. 

Intro to database week 5 - What the graph?

week 5 - What the graph?

This week was a bit jacked for me. I was supposed to mail a box to Mexico but then got a call "we'll let you know in a few hours if you need to mail that stuff". Instead they called and told me to go to Mexico the next morning. What was interesting about that is that my battery in my laptop sucks so I wrote on paper this week. I don't normally write on paper at all during the week or month. It was nice to try that out for a change. Printing homework, and writing on paper, pretty odd. Then I spent a while learning some online diagram software along with diagram software for my phone so I could make things look nice because my hand writing is really bad. It looks a bit like I'm having a seizure when I write but my hands are actually pretty steady because I can do microscopic soldering for circuit boards. 

That's water under the bridge though because my homework is in and this week was really great for me overall even though I was so slow. After getting home from Chihuahua I watched a good documentary on Sunday about the guy that made the Segway and he said he's a really slow learner but he just keeps re-reading things until it soaks in. That was my plan for this week and it seemed to work out. So overall this week the subject was cool graphs that are your pre-planning for database development, but also an iterative process during database design and implementation. Drawing graphs that show how items are connected lets you figure out where you are going to run into trouble or see new connections you didn't think of before. Two kinds of graphs were presented, the Chen model which seems like it isn't very cool, and the Crow's Foot Model which seems very nice indeed.

What makes the Crow's Foot Model So nice? Well for one it seems that good graphing software supports it's symbols and makes creating these graphs fun. These diagrams also are very descriptive in expressing the quantity of each item and their relationship. Are there ten sailors per ship? Does each sailor get their own ship? Is there a law that says people can only have two kids or one car? These are all important information for your database that look like garbage when written out in long sentences. They of course need to be compressed into nice connected graphs that are concise and show you what is going on at a glance. Nobody has time to read your epic novel about rules and by requiring interpretation you leave room for mistakes during implementation. So draw cool graphs instead.

Well, that's the critical information from this week summed up. Draw nice graphs like this one homework 5.3!

week 5 pt 2 - Multi-frequency & multi-sample smart colorimetry for water analysis 

The big distraction for me lately has been fish tank water. What's a nice way to press 1 button and have information logged to your database about the quality of your fish water? Colorimetry is popular of course, like this example unit from IORodeo .

There are also a variety of commercial handheld units with a specific frequency of light that they use to measure things like chlorine and ammonia. The basic principle being that they measure the absorption of light of a given frequency going through a sample to determine the concentration of a known solution. For example with fish water there are sample kits from companies like API which let you test a variety of chemical levels. PH, Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrites, these are all critical information for keeping fish healthy and happy. Low cost colorimeters generally hold one sample though and use one frequency of light. They also don't seem to automatically log the information to a centralized database. It's almost as if they think you're going to want to connect the device to a computer over USB and log the data yourself, or worse yet write it on paper. As we discussed earlier that just isn't an option. 

So it seems to me the solution is clear, the world needs a low cost colorimeter that hold many vials at once for testing difference chemicals simultaneously, which also logs to a database on it's own. It would probably need some internal storage in case you are lazy and don't connect it to the internet, and it should be able to connect to your smart phone of course because everybody loves phones. I think this could be good project because although my interest is fish water, my dislike for repetitive actions could benefit others by providing an inexpensive multi-sample solution. By allowing the device to be re-configured with a phone application each sample could be tested for concentrations of a different chemical, or multiple samples could be tested for the same chemical. This would require a few light sources for each sample so that the wave length projected could be customized. The good news there is that LEDs are just about one of the least expensive things in the world right now. 

On the receiving end light sensors, even advanced ones that give you lots of information, are also very inexpensive these days. Wifi enabled microcontrollers like the ESP2866 are also very cheap. So it seems there is room in the budget to make the housing look really cool and have a unit that holds 4-5 samples at once for testing with the press of a button.