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Like if you still follow this blog :)
So I had to revive an old phone today and couldn't help but check out tumblr. Anyone still follow this blog? Quick life update: graduated from Georgia Tech with my Computer Engineering degree back in May 2017! Moved out to Texas to work as a software engineer for Texas Instruments shortly after.
Computer Science
*screams into the public static void*
Hey all, sorry I haven't posted in forever. Tumblr did that password reset, and for some reason the reset email never shows up in my inbox (and yes I did follow all their suggestions on the troubleshooting page). I sent in a support ticket to tumblr but haven't gotten a response yet. For some reason I stayed logged in on my phone, but I hate typing anything using my phone keyboard which is why I haven't made a text post in a while. I'll get around this though, and start making update posts soon again! I started my internship at Texas Instruments two weeks ago and I want to tell y'all what I've been up to :)
So there is that thing that I wanted to point out. People who use stickiy notes-don’t pull it from the bottom, it’ll start to fall of and it wil be weird. Pull it from the side-it doesn’t fall of and it looks better. Hope this helps!
After this semester my overall GPA is 3.52, and to make highest honors (and get the coolest cords for graduation!) I need a 3.55... I'm so close but so far :')
Custom circuit board printer takes out 2015 James Dyson Award
A team of Canadian engineers has taken out one of the world’s top design prizes with a 3D printer that prints out customized circuit boards with the press of a button.
Grades are back! Overall my GPA for this semester is 3.63 :) In retrospect if I realized how easy my EAS (Earth and Atmosphere Science) final was going to be I actually would have spent time studying for that. And I also wish that I had done better on the ISYE tests throughout the semester.
But hey! I did my best for such a course heavy semester, and I'm pretty darn glad that I got A's in my CS class and ECE classes which in the end are what matter the most to me :)
Last two finals today!
To be honest, I really haven't been doing the best studying for either one. My first final is for my Earth and Atmospheric Science class, where I need a 35 on the final for a B and a 90 for an A. That may so doable, but my test average so far has been an 80, and for one of those I really put in some effort and still only got a B. I would have tried harder in this class, but for the first half of the semester I was planning on just taking it Pass / Fail until I realized I needed to take it for a letter grade. Since my original plan was essentially to just get a C, I never attended class much. So yeah, I kinda just need to show up to the final and be conscious and I'll have my B.
My second final is for my Networking class, and for this one, assuming he follows the grade distribution of the first two tests, I only need around a 60 on the final for an A. I did really well on the first two tests, so I'm really not worried for this one either.
So since I'm not borderline between grades for either class right now, it's been sooo hard to motivate myself to study. It kinda makes me feel bad, but at least by the end of the today I will be done!
My school's ECE department asked me to be a part of their official women's recruitment video (which is really awesome and I'm honored that I get to be a part of it!) and today they sent out the details of what they want our talking points to be. And it's just hilarious because there are 10 ladies total (including me) who are going to be in the video, and the whole video cannot be longer than 2 minutes... So according to my talking points, I have < 12 seconds to talk about everything IEEE, the size of our ECE department, and the work I've done on my research project?? Haha I just imagine my bit in the video going, "Hi I'm Kristen Fernandez I lead IEEE and we do stuff and our ECE department is great aaaaand uh yeah cool research! I love ECE! Go Jackets!"
I had an 8am final this morning and I didn't wake up until 8:20am
Yup, today is definitely a highlight on the list of stupid things I’ve done in college.
Last night I guess I somehow managed to accidentally turn off my 7am alarm, so when I woke up this morning at 8:20am my first thought was "Huh, my alarm hasn't gone off yet and it's really bright in the room." My second thought was "I want to go back to sleep, but let me just check how much more time I have until my alarm goes off." I check the time, and cue the 30 seconds of intense panic and despair. The main reason why I was so distraught was because my professor announced that according to school policy, he wouldn't let anybody into the final after 8:20.
So I change and rush over and I'm at the test room at 8:35. It was pretty terrible walking in there - there were tears in my eyes, my hands were shaking, and he was at the front of a big auditorium so I had to do a walk of shame past all the other students to the front to talk to him.
The first thing I said to him was "I'm so sorry I'm late, but is there any way I can still take the final?" He gave me a heart attack by starting out with "Well school policy says I can't let you in here after 8:20am" but thank god he finished by saying I could still take it.
My initial goal was to get an A on this final so I could get an A in this course, but the final ended up being a lot harder than I thought so I'm pretty sure I didn't get an A. But honestly, considering that I was close to just flat out failing the course, I will gladly take a B.
Man, today is going to be a day that I'm going to look back at and laugh. But I was so sincerely afraid that I was going to fail this Probabilty & Statistics class and have to take summer classes or in the worst case scenario, push back my graduation (because Prob-Stat is a required pre-req for Senior Design, which I need to take in the Fall to stay on track).
Well, lesson learned: always set multiple alarms if you have an early final.
Here is my team's demo video for our Embedded Systems final project! We had to keep it less than a minute for presentation purposes so unfortunately we could not show it off more.
As a quick overview, we made a Mbed Air Drum Kit that is capable of playing 7 different sounds. Swinging the 'drumsticks' down will detect a hit and play a noise, and then swinging the drumstick to the side will play a different noise. There are resistors on the ground that trigger the bass drum and also switch the hi-hat sound. Watch the video, and I'll the link below is our documentation if you want to read more about it in depth! :)
https://developer.mbed.org/users/KrissyHam/notebook/mbed-air-drums/
What do you think about neural nets?
From what I know of them I think they’re pretty cool, but I haven’t studied them in depth.
The Bioo Lite harnesses energy from photosynthesis and generates enough for a regular house plant to charge your smartphone.
WIP video of my Embedded Systems final project! Our team is making an mbed air drum kit; there are IMUs at the end of the PVC 'drumsticks' I'm holding, and then we can detect a downward hit and send a MIDI message to my laptop to play a sound.
The main work that still needs to be down is detecting an acceleration to the side, which will trigger an instrument change. So if I'm holding the right drumstick and I quickly shift it to the right, it will change the sound that drumstick plays from a drum to a cymbal.
The project is turning out to be harder than we thought (so much fine-tuning to be done with the IMUs to avoid false positives!) but it's really awesome seeing things working and coming together :)
Yesterday I competed in my school's CTF (capture the flag) competition and I got 6th! Considering that I haven't gone to any of the CTF meetings in forever and I really didn't know what I was doing, I'm pretty pleased with myself :) I was actually in the top three for 3/4 of the competition (it ran from 10:30am - 5pm) but then I exhausted all the easy problems I could do and I started working on a really hard problem. The most frustrating part was that I was SO close to finishing that hard problem, that if I had gotten it I would have shot back up to 3rd place and won a prize. Oh well, I'm still proud of myself for holding my own, especially since I was one of two girls in a room of 20 guys!
Ayyy, here's the second game and the hardware for the rest of my research project! Sorry the video is kinda scattered-brained, especially when I explain the game. I tried to rerecord it but then the hardware started getting super sensitive and was just constantly detecting button presses all over the place.
Going into a little more detail about the game and hardware, each button when pressed sends a 4 digit binary code (0000 is no presses, 1000 is the first button, 0100 is the second button, etc) to the tablet, which is that first debugging line. The line beneath it turns the above binary into a simple integer (0, 1, 2, 3) to better correspond with the number sequences that show up on the screen. When the correct button is pressed, the corresponding white box will either turn green or red, depending on if you hit the right button. The game crashes because each round I make an array that is the length of the number sequence, and every time a button is pressed I increment a counter. In the code, I never check to see if the counter is greater than the array length (sloppy, I know). I had to incorporate debouncing into the code as well since otherwise a single button press could actually look like several button presses in the software, so that is a little finicky as well.
I explain the general motivation in the first demo video I made; that still applies here, and this specific part of the project is an expansion of the first part. So as I explained in the first post, people with cerebral palsy or stroke may lose hand / wrist function as a result of their disorder. However, having grip strength is a one of the highest factors for perceived quality of life - after all, with grip strength, you have privacy, you can take care of yourself, etc. Therefore, our project seeks to aid in grip strength rehabilitation using our robotic exoskeleton and gaming suite.
Overall, a lot of fine-tuning work to be done, but I'm glad that the base of it is up and running!
Watch / read about the first half of my research project here
Woohoo, got my CS test back and my score was an 83 while the average was a 72! I was really nervous about this test, because this test was more or less the determining factor in whether or not I can be exempt from the final, but my course grade is still an A which means I can be exempt! Since I can just keep my grade as is (with the exception of waiting for one more homework grade to be returned, which definitely will not bring me down to a B), I'm basically done with this class so I don't need to go to lectures anymore or bother with the extra credit assignment :)
