Next week = This week -> next

Hey guys,
It's been a pretty long week, tons of things happened....sig finally arrived, components undelivered, presentation postponed, account tending to zero, wap still not installed...but overall just one good thing happened- the sig . Since chak has already dedicated a post to it,so let's get into 'behind the scenes' of the other stories.

Last batch of components ordered using the seed money include the camera,video TX/RX, frame grabber,development terminal ATMega128, Serial Port Dongle Programmer, magnetometer etc. Two orders were placed at Sparkfun for the embedded items, out of which only one has been delivered, that too after a long delay. The other order shall be arriving in 1-2 days. Order placed for the camera at Sify, has been cancelled by them due to non-availability of stock, but I am still waiting for the amount to be refunded back. Frame grabber is on its way to the UAS lab. The main cause of worry for me until this noon was TX/RX order placed at BlackWidow. I say until this noon because after almost 15 mails, Bill Strong took few minutes out of his busy schedule to reply back to me regarding the order status and further details, hence I believe the package will step into the UAS lab hopefully next week.

Last weekend everybody was asked to bring a pair of formals for the big presentation to be given in front of the Technical Committee, Dean IRD and hon'ble Director. But due to lack of communication, it was only the UAS team, plus it's faculty advisers, physically present in the senate hall. The meeting has been hopefully rescheduled for next Tuesday. This time, I am not bringing any formals (I think they are jinxed!!).
To successfully complete the project this year, the ream desperately needs the second instalment of Rs.2.5 Lakh, that too before the next week ends. All the paper work for the same has been almost done.

Internet is one intangible component of the UAV without which I think nothing can be done and it's lack of it in the UAS lab is definitely a huge problem. Wimax was considered as the best solution for this but money constraints and a promised high bandwidth and speed from our CC head led to the acquisition of the Wireless Access Point, which is yet to be installed. Again, I am 'hoping' that it will be done in the first half of the next week.

Now some update on machine vision, I have completed the Phase 1 and started studying neural networks. A feed-forward network designed by Alexander Faaborg is the best I could find till now. I will be starting coding it asap. Moreover, I have mailed Mr. Faaborg, who is currently working on the user interface of Firefox 3, to guide me a bit. His homepage :http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~faaborg/index.htm

That's it for this week, I will be back with more interesting stories next week (which will obviously be longer than this one), till then 'May the force be with Us'...

Rohit Arora aka. RA