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.

 

Week 5 (2/22/2013) Spring 2013

Week 5 (2/22/2013) Spring 2013

This week was President's day week - RPI had a holiday on Monday (Please see a nice LA Times cross word puzzle here based on presidents' theme!) and we had Monday schedule on Tuesday! So our regular meeting took place on Friday instead of Tuesday.  I am really happy to see so many green smiley faces in http://rcos.rpi.edu/ (21 of 34 projects updated, 18 of 34 repositories updated and 15 of 34 blogs updated! ) - Great job and also thanks to Colin Rice for stepping to be a sysadmin.

We had the following speakers


1) David Vorrick, Sean Moran, Forest Trimble, Luke Champign and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi
- Linux Video Processing Program http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mkvsynth/

2) Sean Chase,Amelia Peterson and, Tiffany Entwistle - Lasers and Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lasers-and-logic/

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

4) Ethan Bond, Nikhil Srinivasan, Austin Gulati, Damian Mastylo and
Raymond Jacobssen  - Baby Notes http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/babynotes/

5) Christian Johnson and Dan Kimball  - RPIDirectory  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

6) Jorel Lalicki, Brian Barnes, Jonah Gruber, Justin Jones, Monica
Kosciu and Andrew Lynch - Open Source Spectrometer...  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-spectrometer/

David, Sean, Forest, Luke and Wyler talked about their video processing system for linux.  They are progressing along. Their idea is to get a simplified version working. One of their stumbling blogs is to write an interpreter for a scripting language.  As usual there were a number of suggestions and volunteers to help them. I am also glad to see tat te work gets divided among group members.

Sean, Amelia and Tiffany talked about their lasers and logic game. Since their project involves both hardware and software, they are progressing on both ends. They even had a working (almost working) demo of their hardware/software. 

Shawn and Brendan talked on their project Dr. Memory. Brendan is getting familiar and building it on Fedora. Shawn is continuing his work on windows 64 (for windows 8/7) system calls.

Ethen, Nikhil, Austin, Damian and Raymond are making great strides with Baby Notes. They have a schedule and they are closely sticking with the schedule. Their project which monitors/takes notes on their baby progress will be easily adaptable to other situations (where one wants to monitor) and consult with social community 

Christian and Dan reported their progress with API documentation and intelligent search for RPI Directory. They also reported that the RPIDirectory for Androids are out in the play story.

Jorel, Brian, Jona, Justin, (Monica) , Tim and Andrew talked about the Spectrometer project and another project on capacitance for Physics 2 lab. Both projects are progressing along.  The capacitance project is almost done.  

I was elated to see the progress and the active participation. I am really privileged to be associated with this group.