(no subject)
I went to the Interdisciplinary Project Team orientation class today, and am now officially enrolled-ish in the MAE department's baby for my Senior Design Credit. I think I'm excited about this. See, it's no real secret that I'm more than slightly envious of the mechanical engineering department. I'm a geek. I wanna play with cool toys. Sure I'm gonna make more money than yer average ME, and sure, I kinda like coding, and I get computers and FPGA's and blah blah blah I want robots dammit! I want to make robot dogs and gyrocopters and remote control cars real cars and laser beam deathrays!
So anyway, I'm on a team of a couple MAE's and about a billion ECE types looking for toys to play with. The toy in this case is a small helicopter type thing that cost UAH about 15 thousand, and we're going to make it fly all by itself by GPS about three kilometers with about 4 waypoints. In theory, we're going to try to make it recognize a particular building in a fake city, then identify an open window, then send a drone in and take pictures. On the other hand, about half a dozen teams with an actual budget have spent two years on this project, and four have managed to meet the first requirement, and one(1) has managed to find the building; we're not really expecting to get too far this semester. *sigh* And I actually have a few ideas of how to do the image recognition, too. At any rate, we were all excited, and then they told us that because the helicopter is so freaking expensive, we're not going to be allowed to play with it. Or even touch it. They're going to come up with designated flight team to do all that. Dammit. It might not even fly before I graduate. Ah, well. At least I get to put my name on it and be associated with in open houses and stuff.
So anyway, I'm on a team of a couple MAE's and about a billion ECE types looking for toys to play with. The toy in this case is a small helicopter type thing that cost UAH about 15 thousand, and we're going to make it fly all by itself by GPS about three kilometers with about 4 waypoints. In theory, we're going to try to make it recognize a particular building in a fake city, then identify an open window, then send a drone in and take pictures. On the other hand, about half a dozen teams with an actual budget have spent two years on this project, and four have managed to meet the first requirement, and one(1) has managed to find the building; we're not really expecting to get too far this semester. *sigh* And I actually have a few ideas of how to do the image recognition, too. At any rate, we were all excited, and then they told us that because the helicopter is so freaking expensive, we're not going to be allowed to play with it. Or even touch it. They're going to come up with designated flight team to do all that. Dammit. It might not even fly before I graduate. Ah, well. At least I get to put my name on it and be associated with in open houses and stuff.