So I am finally done with my undergrad and I have a nice long summer off until I start my job as a Software Engineer for Cisco Systems in September. I don’t have all that many tech or software projects planned but it will be a fun packed summer. I am traveling to Maine, Colorado, and Peru to hike the Incan Trail and with my new found love for photography I am sure that I will capture tons of memories. I have not been too terribly great about updating this site but that should change with all of the new things that will be going on in my life the next few months.
For my senior project I am working in a group with two other persons to develop an automatic transmission controller. This controller will be developed for the General Motors 4L60E transmission. It is a microcontroller based system and the controller we are using is a dsPIC33FJ256MC710 from Microchip.
We are implementing this design with the FreeRTOS.
Troy, one of my group members, laid out these beautiful boards and Tyler has created some really useful debug software. I am working on the main control software and will post a demo of the software in the near future.
Last semester in my control systems class we set out to solve an inverted pendulum problem using a PID controller. We decided to implement this in a way similar to botka the balancing robot or the nBot.
For a microcontroller we used the dsPIC30F4012 and loaded FreeRTOS on it. We used a angular rate sensor and accelerometer from SparkFun as our inertial measurement unit. We applied the control system to a basic R/C car and were successful in getting the car to balance. I plan on making a second version at some point in time to improve on some things, but for a first go this balancing bot performed fairly well.
The video below was made during the project for the purpose of advertising our department at Texas A&M University. Tyler Hollar did most of the final edits and did a really good job.
So I am currently on my second internship with Cisco Systems. Last summer I worked in and ASIC verification group but this summer I am working with a board design engineer. The products I work with are storage switches designed to be used with blade server chassis. One of the specific switches I work on is the Cisco MDS 9124e. I spend a lot of time in the lab doing various testing and also studying the new designs. I have learned a lot in my few short weeks and think that it has been a great opportunity so far. It is really great that Cisco has allowed me to gain experience in two different areas of hardware engineering, ASIC and board design.
As far as the location is concerned I do not think it could get any better. The job is in San Jose, California and I absolutely love the bay area. The weather is awesome and there always seems to be something to do on the weekends. There are many tech oriented events scheduled on the weekends and there seems to be a decent electronics hobbyist crowd in the area, which is great. If I end up moving out here I am sure I will always be able to find someone to work on a project with.
I hope to have some stories/pictures from my travels in the bay area this summer up in the next few weeks.
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