So just in case you haven’t heard, I’m going ahead with this whole graduate school thing right here at Notre Dame. I’m happy to keep the familiar people and surroundings as I ease into this new mode of life. Really buckling down and focusing on my career and academic goals is a fairly new feeling for me. The work is rather interesting so far and I really want to make a big splash around here.
As for the project: I’m being financially supported for the next two years as a part of a CCLI grant through the National Science foundation. In a nutshell, this project aims to explore some new approaches to the undergraduate curriculum around here. Due to the wide availability of consumer electronics, cell phones, ipods, etc, most new engineers entering EE are already reasonably familiar with the concept of signals and interactions between digital systems. This is a lot different than the previous generation of EEs, most of whom got their start messing around with resistors, capacitors, and inductors, learning more about circuits and electronics (or at least interacting with these things) before they start college. As such, most traditional curriculums are geared towards starting with the basics (ie: circuit analysis, ohm’s law, etc). Students of ‘yore could understand these things very readily.
Unfortunately, most young people today grow up without any relevant hands-on experience with electrical components due to the fact that integrated circuits and their corcuit boards have gotten so small and complex that it’s difficult to understand their operation without the truckload of theory and arm-waving that goes on during the first couple semesters of any traditional EE experience. Digital information, on the other hand, is a much more straightforward thing for new EEs to understand due to most no doubt having had hands-on experience with devices that operate on the principles of data representation and exchange. The sleight of hand that was formerly needed to convince students of the ‘black box’ operation of these systems now seems to come naturally to so many.
It’s the sign of our times: I know what goes in, I know what I want to come out, and I don’t give a crap about what goes on in the middle - pure black-box thinking at its finest. It’s the proverbial hamsters-on-wheels scenario: the inner workings are so bizarre at times that it’s not even worth asking why on earth we decided to do it that way in the first place.
At any rate, my work doesn’t have any direct intervention in this philosophy. I will, in effect, be taking every lab, instrument, and piece of astronomically-expensive piece of equipment I used as an undergrad, and will ram these components together at high speed, hopefully producing a product that students will use in a ‘vertically-integrated’ environment throughout their 3+ years wading through the murky swamps of EE. The short (ha!) checklist of what we’re trying to make:
1. Do anything and everything, including stuff we haven’t decided on yet
2. Be cheap
3. Be sexy and robust
4. Interact with a cross-platform software suite (of our making) that does everything
5. Also be capable of doing most of these things without intervention from the computer
6. Be extremely interactive and customizable - essenially ‘pins-out’ through and through
7. Be expandable
8. Be as close to completely open-source as possible
9. Cure cancer
I’m still working on how that last part is going to play out.
I remain optimistic about the outcome of things and the massive amount of prototyping that will be going on over the next two years. I’m looking closely at Atmel’s new AVR32 line of application processors (which, apparently Erik is shooting/shot into space - http://nanosat.wustl.edu/projects/). They are certainly sexy little ICs, but will definitely be a challenge to design for as they represent a relative design complexity upgrade for me akin to learning to drive the space shuttle with my feet.
Awesome.
Enough ranting. More on this later. I need to find out about the university’s licenses of OrCad or Eagle is simply going to kill me.
Phew. I’ll see you kids at the backer.