NCSS 2015 - Day 5

By Kaj (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0
 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

We have a Project!

Lecture 7: An overview of the project and some other stuff.

In light of the many health Apps and embedded systems (think fit bits) that are around. We're going to be doing a project that takes inputs along the theme of health and uses one of the Boe Bots (http://www.adafruit.com/product/749) to manage the output. Something along the lines of "balance on one leg to make the robot go forward". Only our idea will be better. 

We talked about the kinds of sensors health apps use and these include accelerometers, glucose trackers, heart rate monitors, gps positioning etc. We won't have access to many of these but I'm happy I got my accelerometer working yesterday. Now we have to do some bench-marking and work out what shape of information we want to track (e.g. if we want to track steps we need to see what a step looks like and define a range of movement).

I want to do something like a "Bop-it game" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bop_It) where a speaker plays an instruction (kind of like fast simon says) and the person has to do that movement in order to get their robot to do something and "win". Still working out the fine details so I can pitch it to my team.

I wonder if my attention is wandering because I'm feeling a little overloaded?
An easy day was deserved and warranted.

No labs in the morning - it was the tutors' day off so there were "Master class" sessions with invited lecturers. I didn't realise I was invited so organised to go to the pool. I will try to get some summary information to add later.

Free time in the afternoon. Last year I went to a movie with the teachers. This year I played squash with the tutors. Let me think about which was more relaxing...

Important Things Learned: 

Dr James Curran https://twitter.com/DrJamesCurran really can play squash

That was need a common header file to share definitions between different parts of a project. Also Git http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

Evening Activity: Formal Industry Sponsors' Dinner. A great night where teachers, tutors, industry reps and the students all talk and intermingle in a friendly, non-intimidating atmosphere. Well done to the team of organisers. There was a "back of the envelope calculation" where as a group you have to use logical reasoning to come up to the answer to an impossible question. Tonight's question... on Day 1 for the newspaper tower challenge there was a stack of newspaper for each team... if you laid the newspaper short sides together end to end how far would it stretch? 

Murder 2.0: I don't really understand this game but I'm not dead, not undead and have no way of killing anyone. I'm flying under the radar. There appear (from conversations at dinner) to be quite a number of people in the same situation.