Circuits And Math

Both of which are very, very interesting, although I may be in the minority for believing so (in my house, at least). I woke up today at 10:30, agonized over what to wear and what to bring and what I should do for the rest of the day, then headed over to the computer science building, which I know I called something at the beginning of my Fish Wings posts, but I can't recall anymore. I went up to the third floor and found the lab for my programming class, and two TAs.

This was for ROM, because our lovely captains wanted to see if FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) were suitable for our cause, and if so, how complicated would they be to learn. The first time I had ever heard of FPGA was two weeks ago, when one of the captains sent my research partner and I an email. And my research partner, who fortunately is at least in computer engineering, but unfortunately is in his first year taking all the basic math and science classes, know nothing about it as well.

So I asked my TAs (I think they were for my class? Although on the board several other classes were written) who I should talk with, and they directed me to this mobile robotics lab in the electrical engineering building (of course it would be in a building I go to almost every day and yet still have no idea what's inside). I got to talk with one of the grad students who was (and maybe still is) a TA for a class that I am supposed to take in the far far future that is exactly on FPGAs. Well, and a bunch of other things.

Before this, I already knew the basics of FPGAs, like how they're programmable on the machine-code level and they process in parallel, which reduces their processing speeds greatly. But the grad student gave me a lot of interesting information on FPGAs (like they take a long time to learn to program, in the ballpark of 3-4 months for what we want to use it for, which is positioning with advanced sensors), along with other things that I have always heard of but never actually understood, like Arduinos and BeagleBoards. The latter is really fascinating, as it's just like a computer with similar processing chips and ports and circuits, but on a much smaller scale and only on one board, and it runs linux by default.

Or, well, I think that's what it all is. I might have gotten a few concepts mixed up here and there, because so much of it was completely new to me.

I guess this means that we won't be using FPGA for our main processor in the robot, because our competition is coming up within a year and I don't think it's exactly a good use of time to spend a couple months just figuring out how to use something and then programming the algorithms that go on top of it. But it's definitely something that would be nice to explore for the future.

(On a slightly related note, every other Tuesday a guy is in the all-things-electrical lounge offering sessions on building electronics and selling kits, and I know he was talking about Arduinos. Maybe I should get one myself and play around with it.)

And now this post is getting rather long, so I'll save the math (Brahmagupta! Archimedes!) for next time.