Finals Week

Today marked the first day of finals week. My finals include Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, Engineering Physics, and Computer Science I (C++). Today I finished the Differential test, and tomorrow is Engineering Physics. For whatever reason I am really relaxed, who knows why.

I was getting sick of studying this past weekend and took an hour to write a little paper that introduces the basics of C programming, download-able here (pdf warning). It's nothing special, and I don't intend to distribute it like I did with my AVR screencast tutorial. Something fun to do I guess.

Back from SAE funded trip to Cobo.

Just got back from a trip to the Cobo center to watch a presentation on the Honda Insight and the Hondajet, presented by Yasunari Seki and Michimasa Fujino of Honda. That Hondajet is pretty awesome...

1 Month Left!

One month left of school! Just finished the Linear Algebra test covering eigens. I feel I did good, but I goofed up on the last problem. I made the foolish assumption to rely on my calculator. I used rref on a matrix with a variable, and since the rref function for the 89 runs it symbolically, it did not care about the fact that one of the row operations it made would be undefined at h=6. Lesson learned, never go beyond reduced echelon form (ref) using the calculator.

In other news, I've been messing around with Gameboy assembly. I decided to pick a very simple commercial platform to work with, just for the sake of learning (and fun!). The gameboy architecture is very simple and easy to work with, and after scouring the four corners of the internet through mountains of dead hyperlinks, I gathered up the necessary resources to both compile assembly into a gameboy ROM and even found a nice tile editor that outputs to Gameboy format. Since this is the original one, all I have to worry about is pixelated images with 4 colors. I don't intend to delve too deep into it all, just make a simple game to learn a bit about it. The Z80 like architecture is very familiar looking and has some interesting changes for use with the Gameboy. I chose to stay away from C simply because the libraries out there were next to non-existent and I wanted as much control and experience with the raw hardware as possible. As of now I have just a sprite that moves around the screen with arrow keys, but we'll see what I come up with in the future.

Accepted!

Accepted to University of Michigan - Ann Arbor for the Computer Engineering program! While optimistic, I still realize that I need to make sure I can obtain the funds to afford to go there. We'll see what happens, pretty excited, but also have to keep in mind that I need to make sure I do well in Linear Algebra. Had a 70% my first test which even with my recent 98% test score is making life real hard in that class. Only time will tell!

UPDATE: Was just accepted to University of Michigan - Dearborn, in case I decide to go there instead.

Studying!

Nothing really interesting happening, just studying a lot these past 2 weeks. Received a 96% on my Physics test, but I have no idea how I'll do on the Linear Algebra test this Monday. It's not so much knowing the content as knowing all the terminology, which is a pain. Three different ways to represent the same thing, along with each having it's own terminology as to how to do the same thing. Oh well, just gotta keep studying.

It's always slow at the beginning of the semester.

Nothing new really going on. I do have FAT32 down and hope to have a SD card breakout board ship to my house soon so I can start learning how to interface with that. Hope to be able to setup a simple SD Card reader, possibly have an interface through UART to my PC for a terminal style interface. I am pretty disappointed with the resources for learning how to navigate the FAT32 filesystem. It came down to 2 sites I used to learn it, the official specifications given by Microsoft (which are in some other language) and a guide by this guy that was not specific enough for me. After creating a partition on my hard drive, zeroing it, and putting FAT32 on it, it finally became clear to me. It's pretty simple when it's all laid out for you.

Vacation!

Well, grades are in, and all As except for Engineering Physics 1. Received an 88% in the class, which was just not enough for an A. I still was ranked second in the class, so I guess that helps soothe the hurt of my second B haha. I registered for next semester, with my classes being as follows,
3 Credits = CIS 150 - Computer Science 1
3 Credits = MATH 251 - Introduction to Linear Algebra
3 Credits = MATH 273 - Introduction to Differential Equations
5 Credits = PHY 252 - Engineering Physics II

Only 14 credits as opposed to the 19 this past semester, hopefully I'll have more free time for personal projects. All fun classes, I'm very excited! I also submitted my application to University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, I really want to get in. Still don't know if I'll be able to afford it though, lots of scholarships and loan stuff to apply for and look into.