Another Week

Date: 2002-04-19 16:10:12

Yesterday I joined a cadre of engineers, gathered by the on-campus IEEE presence, and hopped in a van to head over to the nearby FPL/BPA windmill installation. Two engineers, an electrical and a mechanical, showed us around the substation, where we saw rows of breakers, huge transformers, and the neat little shed with all sorts of fun equipment. (The actual human-based monitoring is done at another location, but since we wanted to see transformers and 165-foot high windmills, we came here.) We drove up to the base of one of the windmills, in a big row of them, and looked up to see the rotors wooshing down to us. The wind was blowing enough to spin the rotors, but not enough to actually generate any power.

Scott Parish took a bunch of pictures and posted them on the local IEEE website. The picture I linked to above is his, resized for your downloading pleasure. The original is 1600x1200, so I set it as my desktop background (replacing the Liandra), which looks kind of neat. I'm on the other side of the shaft in the picture of the engineers hugging the windmill.

In a move that should please basically everyone involved, Gem and I managed to get signed up for the engaged couple's seminar, which starts tonight in half an hour, I think, so it would be ideal if Gem managed to get home from whatever shopping I think she's still away at. This will absorb this evening and all day tomorrow. Then Sunday morning I get to show up in the Chan Shun Pavilion at 0730 to take the Engineer in Training exam, which will be thrilling beyond my wildest imagining. (I can't wait!) The test is rumored to get out at 1730, which means I get to endure ten hours of being tested for stuff I might have learned throughout my engineering career, including some I never actually had to. (Fluid mechanics springs to mind. Once again, I feel under-represented in my concentration: if there are more questions asking about thermodynamics than digital logic, I'll be mad.)

I find it amusing that the rules disallow "Calculators having a keyboard similar in format to a typewriter key layout, lap top, or other portable computer", which indicates that a TI-92 is disallowed, while a TI-89 (which is the same thing, in a different package) is allowed.

For VLSI, I'm designing a simple eight-bit processor, which should be entertaining. Dr. Aamodt gave us a full-page list of steps we have to go through to get it fabricated, which might actually be possible to accomplish by the end of the quarter. With any marginal amount of luck, I might just have another binary clock by the time I'm done.

(I was thinking about a second revision to my binary clock, but this wasn't what I had in mind. What I really want is an 8051 with on-board program memory and just enough pins to connect to a serial port (although Ethernet would be great fun... and I could probably throw together enough of an IP stack to get UDP working so I could do network time synchronization), the LEDs that display the clock, and a few buttons to set the clock. Ideally I could cut my project down from nine chips to one, two or three.)