Week 10 (10/21/2014 and 10/24/2014) Fall Semester

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/rpi/2014fall/#/28 - RPI Home page has a feature story on RCOS - That is simply awesome!

RPI is bristling with many activities and the fall semester is going in full swing.

On Tuesday (10/21/2014) We had two talks:

1) Chenrui Cao, Xi Xi, Renjie Xie, Juntao Zhuang - 2W
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas Pitt)

2)  Dan Fang, ZeXin Wan - Smart Schedule http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/smart-schedule/ (mentor Moorthy)

2W - When and Where started an as andoid app in the summer. It is now modified into a web application - so it could be used . They use a server code (that Dave Goldschmidt has coded in his network programming class) and showed a little demo. Right now,  2W shows the building hours and offices located in buildings. They are planning to integrate with google maps. 

Smart Schedule is to provie an IOS application (for IPhones) . They have crreated a backend for the schedules. Right now they are building a GUI. There was a suggestion/question to integrate SmartSchedule with course registration/selection. Recurring schedule is another suggestion that came from students.

1)Chandler Dumm, Bikram, Spencer Norris -  AskPI-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askpi/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

2) Dan Baek, Robert Hannum, Jacob Abramson - RPI Mobile Dining Hall
Menu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/ (mentor Dan Baek
- self mentored?)

3) Cyril George, Akshay Matta, Matt Corsaro - Plan of Study -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/plan-of-study/ (mentor Dimitar Dimitrov)

4) Kevin Fung, Darren Lin, Garrett Chang -  Emissary -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emissary/  (mentor Kevin Fung - self
mentored)

5) Arya Seghatoleslami and Tom Yang - YumYum!
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yumyum1/ (mentor Alex Freska)

AskPI is a webapplication built for social application - some voting. Their original aim is to help with student government.  During their talk, students suggested that their project could be of more general use. They are planning to write the entire project in javascript with mongodb. The groups effort is to learn something new and provide a useful web application. This goal is nice and hope they achieve their objectives. They showed a demo of their front end. There were suggestions to imporve that. Backend needs more work. That is what they will be working on, This project is looking for a server. Github was suggested as a solution

RPIMobileDining Hall Menu is to parse sodexo menu and  to provide an app for RPIMobile (android version). Their HTML scrapping and parsing worked (till sodexo changed its html format). They are providing JSON translation of the HTML. Once that is done, the next step is to incorporate into RPIMobile. Future enhancement will include notification of favorite dishes and choice of dietary restriction menu items.

Plan of Study is to provide a mechanism to help students to choose the required and elective courses to fulfil the graduation requirements. The main problem is to get doubl and dual majors and minors. They showed a front end whch the user can select courses in different semesters. Right now the front end works for EE and ECSE and CS courses. They may also provide a category for different departments. The backend has to provide a prerequisites and alternative courses. This project is a high profile project. It can succeed - but needs a close mentoring to get it in giid shape.

Emissary is a spectator of league of legends games. They also provide undocumented features of leagues of legend games. Realtime visualization of games is another important goal. They have done the project using python. They plan to implement the features in coffeescript. They are wll onto completion of their project.

YumYum is a webapplication to find free food available in campus and elsewhere. They decided against scraping - instead getting theemails and other departmental colloquia where free food is available. Also there are commercial opportunities with hotels. .They have a prototype working - Their project is written in Ruby on Rails. They showed a demo - They will add more features to make their project noteworthy. 

In the end a management student (junior) pitched his idea of social connection using IPhones for the choice of clothes. Some of the features included 3D  visualization
As usual there were a number of questions and suggestions from students. That made the eveing very pleasant.

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Last week's hackathon (7/19/2014) was a great occassion to get some work done. A fraction of the rcos group showed up . Many thanks to Jorel and Robert for awesome help and contribution. They went above and beyond to get this done. We even had an official photographer come by to shoot some photos!

Only two more weeks left for the end of the summer. Here is a re-re-revised list of talks today.  Great to see so many smiley faces on http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ page - Please keep up the good work and keep the momentum going. 

1) Chenrui Cao, Kai Kang, Xi Xi, Juntao Zhuang - 2W http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas) 2nd Talk - Great

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Charles)  2nd Talk - Great

3) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/ (mentor Niccholas) 2nd talk - Great

4) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  2nd Talk - Great - no code updates in Observatory?

 

5) Sami Modak, Tong Liu - Anti-Distracted Driving, http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/anti-distracted-driving/ (mentor Andy) -

6) Sean Hagan - Plan Of Study - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-plan-of-study/ (mentor Connor)

7) Dan Bruce, Gabe Perez - NMS - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/polytechnic-nms/ (mentor Connor)

8) Zexin Wan - OSCGC- (Open Source Card Game Center) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/(mentor Ji Woong) 

9) Michael Hosier -  Open Cores- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/opencores/ (mentor Jorel) 

10)  Soraya Fouladi, Andrew Kaiser, Theo Browne - RPI CS Website -

11) Abby Lopaty - Water tag gun - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/water-tag-gun/ (mentor Soraya)

Chenrui, kai, Xi and juntao talked about their 2W ssytem (when and where on Androids). The data base lies with client (in SQLite). they showed a demo of the system and it is pretty functional. They plan to include abbreviations, maps and the data updated. They plan to release to the Android market before the beginning of Fall semester.

Charles gave his second talk about CDashboard. He worked on the comments that he recieved during his first talk. He fixed a racing condition bug, improved stopwatch, no clipping of photos/slide show. He showed a demo. It is written in C# and looks like a cool system,

Nicholas gave a second talk on OpenLab. He has fixed the crash problem. As per his blog post "We're very proud to announce version 1.0 of OpenLab. This release includes an extensive plugin framework, loading config files, editing config files on-the-fly, and saving them back to xml. Coming up next is calibration and logging plugin support." - Open Lab version 1.0 is out - Hope others will start using it. Jorel had a nice suggestion suggesion about the paarameters setup for serial interfaces,

Tracy gave her second talk about music theory RPG. She is getting the ngame mechanics working. She is using PyGame (which she found sometimes difficult to use) - She may shift to Unity in future. As of the moment she is going to have a version of the game (playing against an enemy) for notes,, chords and rhythms etc,

Sami and Tong talked about AntiDistracted Driving. The idea is to prvent texting while driving. They find when they are driving by using accelermeter sensor. If the velocity exceeds certain value, they will lock the texting capability. Tong was concentrating in calculating positions and velocities (of doing a double and single integeral of accelerometer data- The integration introduces noice - Tong is trying to reduce the error). Som suggestions cam about using a periodic GPS data to correct the errors. Sami is working on  locking the key oard if the velocity exceeds certain value. They are doing this for Androis and IPhone platform. There were a lot of interesting suggesions to this group. They hope to have a version before the end of the summer.

Dan and Game talked about NMS (news Management System). They are writing from scratch. This will be the poly website. They gave a demo of their system. they want to ring out this system by fall (or at least concurrently run with their old wordpress based system).  Their system accounts of multiple positions and multiple authors. They want to build some features that are present in http://rpitv.org/

Michael is building a open source video controller using FPGA.  The main objective of open cores is according to  http://opencores.org/opencores,mission

"Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modeled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware."

Michael's main subobjective is o contribute o Opencores in this fashion- accorsding to his projects page  "plan to contribute to OpenCore’s project categories of Video Controller and Communication Controller (http://opencores.org/projects) through the development of an LVDS LCD controller (similar to this project: http://g3nius.org/lcd-controller/) and a communication controller for communicating through Display Port with the ultimate goal of making the two compatible with each other and with other projects on OpenCores."

Michael hopes to have his system (software will be in VHDL) before the end of the summer session.

Soraya, Andrew and Theo are remaking RPI Cs website. They are doing it Ruby on Rails. Soraya had a mockup sketch of the opening page (There were good comments/feedback on that - change the color to red, white and black). Andrew and Theo are working on hte backend. They solicited help from RCOS students to get the project done. This is a high profile project and has to be done before the beginning of Fall semester. Their talk slides can be found in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dZzVNOUxYYVNxLWFFZ2hESFF4YldFazJzdHRZ/edit

Finally Abby talked about building Water Gun. She is doing fluid mechanics calculations, structural analysis to build water Gun. She is leaning on building a skeleton instead of a skin. Since she got the material late, she will be unable to complete the project before the end of summer. But she hopes to have the simulation done before the end of summer. She is planning to use 3 D printing and low cost materials.

The talks are interesting and questions were also interesting. I am getting discouraged by the apathy shown by some students. A few students do not update blogs, post code and not give talks. I feel awful and I am helpless!