Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Last week was an action packed week will be an understatement - With spring weather teasing us and end of the semester looming up on us,  our hands were full with activities. One of the high lights among many  was the use rpi-rfid reader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/  to take attendance.  And of course Alfred  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred/ was on display during accepted students day. I will be remiss if I did not mention the cool rcos cube (image above) with rcos on sides and an open hardware and one software other two sides (Thanks Jorel for designing and making the cube). We have our usual talks by the students

1) Matt Zanchelli  Sonar http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/

2) Mike Agnew - Schenectady Online Reservation System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

3) Shawn Denbow, Brendan Clark Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

4) Austin Gulati - University Hacker Olympics

5) Chris Celi - Topsoil  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/topsoil/

6) Jorel Lalick, Monica Kosciuk, Justin Jones, Jonah Gruber, Brian Barnes OpenSourceSpectrometer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-spectrometer/

Matt has been doing a lot of cool and interesting projects.  His muting system announcemnets (like email notification in Macs) is a very cool project. I will not be able to give adequate justification of his projects by writing tidbits.  He has posted his slides here - Please read it. It is awesome and  his demos were impressive.

Mike has been progressing with his PermitMe/ReserveMe . Mike has met with Schenectady municipal officials. Mike has a simple UI and he has been making use of twitter bootstrap.  Mike hopes to release his system before summer.

Shawn and Brendan have made a lot of progress with Dr. Memory. Shawn is working on system calls for win 32 and Brendan has been documenting the system calls.

Austin briefly talked about the advantages of participating Hacker Olympics (He participated last year). Hacker Olympics (local chapter) was held yesterday (April 13, 2013)

Chris has been making progress with his idea sharing/growing project. He has implemented most of his work (using Ruby on Rails)

Jorel, Jusin, Jonah, Brian and (Monica) talked about their Open Source Hardware/Software Spectrometer. They have made prototype using arduino. They were able to get good results so far. Many high schools are interested in their spectrometer.

It has been a tremendous educational experience for me  Both presentations and questions were excellent. It was a well spent Tuesday evening as usual.