Fun day today. Spent 2 hours being rolled around on a rolling table to record accelerometer measurements on a vehicle without any suspension. Hurts your back after a while though. ;) Have also gone over all the coding I've done so that my supervisor knows his way around it after I leave. Amazing how much you can forget in a few weeks/months. As we need a couple more PCB's for the testbed I went to get those done. After the prototyper had milled them, it turned out it was out of calibration, so none of them were acceptable. :(

Not much progress since last. Have mostly just been playing around with different ways of transferring data from the accelerometer and gyro to the required hardware. On the plus side, we've been allowed to test and do some measurements using a forklift. So hopefully we can soon start working on some proper and realistic data. I've also been playing around with rotating the virtual plane I'm working in to see if that gives a bit better data to work with. No conclusion yet though. Next week is going to be mostly codereview of what I've produced so far so that my supervisor knows my programs and can maintain them.

Have gotten most of the algorithm done and are now working on getting it implemented on our product. The first batch of prototypes are due shortly. Unfortunately there are some problems with the current firmware on our box. More specifically the way we can use the I2C bus to communicate to the acc/gyro chip is waaaaaaay to slow at the moment. roughly 3 byte per second. And one reading consists of 2 byte for each of the axis (3 for the accelerometer and 3 for the gyro) plus 1 for temperature. so that's 13 byte per reading; we need minimum 30 readings pr. second! The firmware is created in China and this creates a quite significant language and culture barrier. So it's going to be interesting to see when (if ever) we can get this bug fixed...

Been reading up A LOT on vector and matrix maths to be able to mentally visualise what's going on on my virtual plane when programming the acc/gyro, so I'm sure my code is working as I want it to. I've also been fiddling around with the low level code and enabled the built-in filter in the acc/gyro chip and adjusted a couple of other things as well. Man, what a difference! Now I've actually got something really useful to work with. :D I'm pretty much able to get a reliable measurement/summation of the velocity when traveling in a fairly straight line without using the gyro. Going to go for a ride most of the morning tomorrow and record a lot of drives so that i have some realistic data to work with. This should ensure that what I'm coding will also work when deployed on a real vehicle. :)

Still battling with the accelerometer and gyro project. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to get it finetuned. Infact, I'm having to rethink my whole strategy on how to calculate the measurements, so I'm in the process of reading up on linear algebra to make sure I've covered all bases.

Been working a lot with the accelerometer and gyro and have almost solved it. I have a reasonably reliable system measuring velocity regardless of pitch, roll, angles etc. Now I just need to get it in the car and trim out all the bugs and make some final adjustments. :D

Had a meeting with one of the owners today. Was good to listen to his feedback and to tell him about my stay so far. We also had a talk about starting to use some sort of project management (like SCRUM) which apparently isn't something they've done before. Also talked about how to document a variety of things so that Collaboration with bigger companies can happen smoothly. Just finished the final part of the server client connection. This was a tough one, has taken me 3 days to figure out a lot of thing regarding .net Remoting, credentials, marshaling etc... Have taking it's toll, but it works now.. :D Have also caught and fixed a couple of bugs in a previous program... ;)

Have abandoned the microcontroller project for now and instead begun a project where we can have a database server with all our configurations and then be able to retrieve them at will from a remote site. Both the database and local config file R/W is up and running, now I just need to get the server/client part to work as well. :-)

Argh.. Have been trying to get a STM8S208 microcontroller to send some CAN codes, but it doesn't want to cooperate!! Stupid thing... :(

Just finished making a program that replaces 3 other programs and makes us only have to use 1 piece of hardware instead of 3.. Well chuffed with myself.. :D

My GUI is almost done with a lot of improved code. It's not bug free, but I'm sure I'll be notified whenever one arises... ;) Still thriving in the work environment and I really feel I'm contributing to the company.

Finally weekend. Have been working on a GUI test application for our hardware using a new (and waaaaay cheaper) interface module and it's working nicely. Have gotten a couple of functions working, just need the rest... ;)

Started working on how to decrypt a checksum. Not an easy task.

Almost done with a test program to analyze accelerometer and gyro data.

Been working a bit more with accelerometer and gyroscope and have now almost a working app for analyzing the data, next job is to do awesome maths... ;)

Finally weekend. Had a good friday with a 1v1 meeting with my supervisor and got answers on a lot of questions. All ready for next week.

Another day gone. Had to leave early to have a driving lesson but it turned out I had the date wrong, so early day for no reason. :/

Another day gone. Got to study a bit of literature regarding accelerometers and gyroscopes. Have to figure out how to get reliable velocity combining the readings from those two.

First day over and done with. Got a bit up to speed and zeroed in on which project I'll be working on. Ended up with a project mainly using C# combined with a bit of embedded system as well.

Starting tomorrow, wondering what the day will bring. :)

Blog created for practical placement at ECTunes. Absolutely no idea what to write on this blog, but i guess it'll come to me eventually.