ACM - Robots, oh my.

Anxiously doing final checkout of the robot

Today our local ACM chapter got our robot functional! We started with a pile of parts and somehow ended up with a robot.

Life - One step forward, two backwards

The past couple days I've gained a little ground, then lost a bunch. I haven't had a ton of time to work on this due to other real life obligations, but I have major changes coming so I thought I'd update.

Game of Life - Step 1

I've completed and attached the first step to my "Conway's Game of Life" project! This allows for arbitrarily sized games, dependent on how big you can realistically synthesize n^2 D Flip Flops.
As you can see by the real exciting image on the right, I'm able to simulate a game properly.

A new project

Image by Digilent Inc.

I recently found myself with some extra time, and being that it has been a while since I've done a extra-circular project, I've decided to find something to do.
Last year in my Senior Seminar class I managed to create a small System on a Chip FPGA project based off the Hack platform in The Elements of Computing Systems. TECS was an amazing book and I would recommend it to anybody becoming interested lower level systems.
While building Hack was a challenging experience, I clearly see the shortcomings of my design.

PCB: Lessons learned

Excuse the long delay, this PCB took forever to arrive.

The PCBs arrived today, and I've already learned a few lessons.

1. Make solder pads as big as possible. 
2. Ensure pinholes are large enough to accept square pins of the same size
3. Leave room for error corrections
4. Create test point vias

In addition to those minor annoyances, I made a mistake in the schematic. The trim resistor is supposed to be connected to ground!

GM862 Custom PCB & Schematic

I decided to try my hand at Eagle and get this off my breadboard.

Telit GM862-GPS Power supply and UART

Working with the GM862 GPS turned out to be a little tricky. It can be somewhat picky about a stable voltage during and works at CMOS logic levels.

Telit GM862 GPS United States Pre-paid Carrier Compatibility

Hopefully this will be of use to someone looking into GM862 US Prepaid carrier compatibility. I had some issues with AT&T, and T-Mobile turned out to be my carrier of choice.