I managed to get out of Religion Class with an A- somehow.  I’m guessing there was a big curve or something.  Saturday class is terrible, and it always seems like there is really nice weather when I’m in class, then it just rains and rains when I’m out of school.  Just my luck I guess.

I’m heading up north for the first time in about 6 months, can’t wait to get up there.  Only 5 more weeks of class, a finals week, and then I’m done!……with my Bachelor’s.  I’ve applied to Oakland University for grad school, not too worried about getting in, but I am a bit worried about finding a full time job before I graduate.  Been getting alot of calls, and went to a decent amount of interviews, but so far nothing.  I think it’s most likely because I started looking too early, and more and more employers don’t want to wait 2-3months for me to graduate.  Anyway I’m not too worried about it, I have to focus on school for now.

The senior design project is going alright I suppose.  As with any forced group project you have people working their butt off, and others who could care less.  It’s frustrating working with people that fail to contribute anything to the project, but I don’t really have a choice.  We’ll most likely just have a prototype to show off at the end of the year, 12 weeks just isn’t enough time to fully develop a quality project.  The prototype is coming along well.

I know I haven’t updated in over a month, but summer term is quite possibly the hardest term I’ve ever encountered.  Thank god it’s my last undergrad term.  19 Credits + 25 hours of work each week, not such a great idea, but it will be worth it when I make it through.  The class on Saturday is good and bad.  Good because it frees up time during the week, and obviously bad because it’s Saturday and it’s always sunny with great weather.

Classes are going well so far, as is work.  I find myself bored when I do happen to find free time between class, homework, and work, because it’s not enough time to really go anywhere.  So I guess that’s a good thing, never thought I would get bored with free time, but when I’m so busy I think I get confused when there’s nothing to do.

Only a few more weeks until 4th of July weekend where I’ll get more than a 1-day weekend.  Planning on going up north and relaxing before coming back to the busy schedule.  Two more months and it will all be over.  Well at least undergrad will be over.  I’m applying to Oakland University for grad school in Electrical and Computer Engineering.  I plan to work full time and get my Master’s over the next two years.

I actually didn’t do half bad this term. I was pretty worried how my grades would look, but turns out they were much better than I thought. Four A’s two B+’s and one B. I am very happy with these marks, especially since two of the classes were pretty much graduate courses, except in each the grad students had slightly more to do.

Last term of undergrad starts tomorrow! Can’t wait to be done! All the engineers get to walk at commencement on May 10th, but we’re all not really graduating until after this summer term. It’s a bit depressing, but like I’ve said many times… The hard work always pays off in the end.

Three more months of 19 credit hours, an 25 hours of work a week. This may be too much for me to handle, but luckily my boss at Denso puts education first and I can cut down on hours whenever needed.

The General Purpose Analog Input project is almost done. Everything is working as expected and I haven’t found any problems with the hardware. That was my biggest fear simply because its much easier to edit code than hardware. The range of values didn’t come out exactly to what I had planned due to some tolerance stack up with the hardware (this was expected however). The stack up exponentially gets worse in some configurations causing to ramp up the input pin quicker than was calculated with ideal values.

I presented my block of the project to the class yesterday and it went well. Below is my presentation.

Took the whopping 8 hour FE Exam today. I barely had any time to study due to my current classes at UDM, I didn’t go in having the highest of hopes. However, after taking it, it turned out to be much easier than I thought! I think I passed it, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself yet. I’ll find out in 12 weeks if I passed or not, seems awfully long for them to throw my scan-tron through a machine!

Finished all the population on the board. I didn’t have a power supply to work on from home, so I rigged it up to a USB Cable. It’s pretty handy considering I’m almost always next to a USB port, I think it’s even more convenient than a wall outlet. I got the debug tool (REAL ICE) communicating with the board and PC with the help of my professor, Tom Stoltz.

So far I’ve just ran some LED sequences to get a feel for it, I want to try using them to detect certain states of my code for the ADC. This way it will be easier to detect what the board is doing at a given time.

The Variable Gain Op-Amps worked the first time I tested it. It was great having it work the first time and not having to debug through the hardware (especially as we near the end of the term). It can detect differences from millivolts up to 24V. Depending on how you configure the GPIO controllers, you can achieve many different gains.

Click to enlarge.