Tales of an (ex)Intern

For the past few months things have been a little quiet on the blog front - this is mainly due to me having a high workload since being back at Uni.

I have been working feverishly on my dissertation - something that is now complete.

For those of you who I havent spoken to here is the gist of it:-

The title is “Water Sampling on an Autonomous Sailing Platform” and it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Dr. Mark Neal and Colin Sauze have been building various sailing boats that sail themselves and my project was to provide a proof of concept for one application - Oceanography.

The system that I built(with help on the hardware) effectively is a pump hooked up to a Gumstix embedded Linux computer which also has attached a Water quality monitoring sonde.

My software is written in C and provides the control to switch the Pump on at specific GPS waypoints - read from a UDP stream from the control software or it can sample at a specific time interval.

Once the pump is on it then starts the sonde which is configured to pass out NMEA strings over a serial line to the Gumstix. This is the taken and passed with location information to a series of scripts written by Claire to send this information to the base.
The pump is then switched off.

The main challange for me in this project was the learning of C as a language and the interesting ways in which hardware injects its own bugs in to a system.

So there are the basics of why you havent heard from me for a while - if you want to know more then ask me and you can have the PDF of my Diss.

Sad to say that my Final Year Project is in the hands of this man :-S

I think that it is about time that i told you what i am working on for my final project. Before the start of the academic year I was approached by dr. Mark Neal who had heard that i was looking for a project - to this end he offered me a project working on his Autonomous Sailing Boat that was in the News in September.

This project was always aimed at Oceanography but till now they have had to concentrate on getting the control software working with the boat. My project is to design and build a water sampling rig that takes samples and stores them in addition to running some tests while still at sea.

There are a couple of ways that we are looking of doing this - the first is to take the water samples that we have pumped and fill a container which houses a piece of equipment called a Sonde. This is a unit that will run tests for us and allow me to store the data. The second method would be to look in to using Solid Phase MicroExtraction to do a form of continuous sampling.

To build this system i am using gumstix (small embedded Linux systems), a bilge pump and some tubing. The basic idea is that the system takes GPS data from the main control software and wakes itself up, runs a POST and then goes to work before sleeping again - this is needed to keep the power consumption down.

This is just a very general overview but as i work on it i will tell you more.

Today started well - Leopard showed up and i Installed it - I have not really had the chance to fully play with it yet so reports coming later on. Sadly today we also had a lecture from Microsoft and i found myself liking something that they were showing us so much that i got home and tried it out straight away its called Popfly and it is built on their new Silverlight technology you need Windoze or Mac OS X to use it as it is a plugin for your browser but it allows you to create widgety things ridiculously easily - drag and drop stylee!! It is still a Beta but if you interested then head to popfly here.

Below is something that i knocked together in literally 3 mins (it is a little basic but proof of point!):-

BTW you need to install the plugin - i think?!?!

The time has come for me to tell you all that I have been very silly….. I have signed up for another cycling event however this time it is for charity.

I am taking part in the BHF Champagne Route Ride which will take me approx 300 miles across France in 4 days - something to give me another target to work towards.

Please just take a minute and visit my sponsor page here and give what you can - it is after all a worthy cause.

A lot has gone on since i last posted - i have been busy trying to get back up to speed with uni stuff etc.

Im now cycling most days to uni - something that my legs wont ever let me forget when i do this with a hangover :-S.

Im back in with the Riding Club here and have been out on the socials so far this year - good fun that they are they always end up in the Union atm for Reload - something that doesnt work well with my vow not to drink that much anymore as it is near impossible to be in Reload and not be Drunk :-(.

Now for the Bike Porn…

As I have barely touched my Full Sus freeride mountain bike in favour of the road bike i have gotten rid of it and replaced it with ….. a Trek Madone 5.0 double - a fully Carbon bike with Bontrager Carbon love in the way of seatpost and stem etc.

Initial thoughts are DRIBBLE it is around 6Lbs lighter than my other roadie and quick though adjusting from my triple is a little difficult esp around here with all the hills :-S

As I seem to have a massive aversion to hill climbing and seeing as I am in Wales I have come to the conclusion that i should confront this painful part of cycling head on - I regularly make a loop out round from mine to devils Bridge - a route that has about 7 miles all up hill to start with - the effects are noticeable as i have lost around 1 stone since being back here :-D.

There will be a post about my final year project coming along with Info on my Nas setup but i just havent had the time yet.

It has been a while since my last post - this is mainly due to the fact that i have been getting ready to head back to aber - and doing some college work :-p

To start at the beginning i have been writing a 5000 word report about my year at sun - im being complimentary about you all dont worry :-). This is actually an incredibly hard thing to do - 5000 words on something like that is very hard to come up with - a lot of history about sun on that. The other thing that i have been doing is writing the proposal for my final year project - this is based on Colin Sauzes Phd working with Dr. Mark Neal on the autonomous sailboat that they have built - to cut a long story short ( i will be boring you with this a lot over the next year) i have to implement something that will take water samples.

As well as this i have been packing to head back to uni in aber where I sit now in a lovely Farm house thing outside aber (about 4 miles) with some wonderful housemates (let go of my arm guys)!!

So that is pretty much it so far - i am attending a course this week and then demonstrating it in the afternoons for money.

It is a bit strange i being back here after a year in work but im sure that i will get back in to the swing of things eventually - i will join the riding club again this year and getting lots of riding in. On the cycling front this year will hopefully be fantastic for my fitness - the route home for uni is basically all uphill

Last week was my last with the guys at Sun I would like to thank them all for all the help that they have all given me this last year, i have learnt a lot from you all.

This last weekend was spent doing not a lot on the saturday and then on the sunday we went along to my old stables (Higher Park Farm) to support some of our friends who were riding in their show. Over the last week or so i also did some work for them in exchange for some riding - i needed to get back on a horse. When we got there i decided that i would compete on a lovely 17.1 ish hh horse - see the pic below. So i booked in and picked up a copy of Prelim 17 dressage test and started to learn it - nothing new for me to learn a test in a short time but this one had strange letters on it - shit it was a 20×60 school test not a 20×40m one which meant that it had extra letters to learn before i learnt the test - it has been about 5 years since i rode a test like this.

Many thanks to Lynsey as she plaited the horse for me and helped out immensely - also many thanks to Nikki Kerr who came along and helped me warm up - it made all the difference.

Long story short we came 2nd - not bad on a horse that i had ridden for an hour tops:D

More to Follow - im too tired right now