Class of 2008
Major: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project Center: Silicon Valley, California
Major Qualifying Project: An automated system to allow researchers in Silicon Valley, California to operate remotely an optical telescope located in Alaska.
Tom Niemczycki
February 6, 2008
It’s hard to believe that it’s already February, and that means I’ve been here for a whole month. This also means that the project is half over, though we’re just now digging into the toughest parts of the project. One challenge of completing a project off-campus is that you have to get up to speed quickly, and then keep a vigorous pace until the very end. Students completing their MQP’s back home have been working on their projects alongside other courses since the start of the year. While we have the benefit of focusing solely on our project (and sightseeing) out here, it’s important that each day is productive.
Our project has changed considerably from how we envisioned it even at the outset of this term. We thought that we would be writing interfaces between existing software to control the telescope system. However, the goals of the project have shifted, and now we are developing our own software. While this approach is more daunting in that there are more technical challenges to overcome, it also affords us the opportunity to be creative. We can brainstorm how we think our software should work, and then write it. I bet that once it’s done we’ll feel pretty satisfied with our work.
But until then, we have to stay on pace. We’ve made some real progress over the last week. A few days ago we put together a prototype to demonstrate how the final project will function. The new approach is a web-driven interface that lets the user control the optical instruments through a web browser. The user simply fills in information in a series of web forms, and our back-end software interfaces with the hardware components through low-level commands. We have all the basic pieces that work well on their own, and now we have to make sure that they all work well as a synchronized system.
Some parts of the project are pretty challenging, but we have resources at our disposal. For example, one of the problems we faced was how to communicate information between independent processes. A few tips from advisors pointed us in the right direction, and from there we were able to find a good solution. Our mentor at SRI has been very involved in our work as well. He provides guidance and shares his knowledge and experience to help ensure that the system architecture we develop is reliable and supportable after we complete the project. While this is my MQP for only nine weeks, researchers will continue to use the project that my team puts together for a long time after we leave.
Outside of work, I have been taking some time to relax and take in everything that Silicon Valley has to offer. I like getting a feel for the local culture and history whenever I visit a place, so I checked out a few museums in the area. My favorite to date was probably the Computer History Museum right here in Mountain View. It chronicles the evolution of computing from simple devices for making quick calculations and early mechanical and analog computers, through the development of digital computers as we know them today. The tour guide in this museum did an exceptional job explaining the driving forces that led to the development of the technology that surrounds us today.
I also made a trip to the Winchester Mystery House a few weekends ago. The 160-room mansion was claimed to be haunted, and has been featured in several television documentaries. More recently, I visited the NASA Ames Research Center and Moffett Airfield Museum. The NASA visitors’ center had a few neat exhibits, and the Moffett museum featured tons of military relics from the last century. Last weekend I visited the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose where I watched an IMAX movie about the Alps and also discovered one of my favorite museum exhibits ever. The museum had two industrial robots on display: one of them moves toy blocks around to spell anything that you enter into its console, and the other one takes your picture and then draws your likeness with a regular ball-point pen. It sounds simple, but it was remarkable to watch a robot draw - especially since I can only imagine the complexity of the algorithms that are controlling its motion. It was really impressive.
Until next week,
-Tom
