M431K3

Please. I'm almost there.

Finally, after at least three months of learning at least four and a half completely new programming languages, running into errors that plagued me for weeks, blood, sweat, tears, gallons of tea, strings of profanity so dire they'd make my grandma turn in her grave, I can say that two of the six projects I had this semester are (almost) finished. And the result isn't too bad either.

My teammate and I demonstrated our Embedded Systems project to the professor on wednesday. We'd been working all day to fix the last small things (that weren't actually that small) and I was confident that my part, a GUI app written in C# (custom buttons and title bars, using a USB protocol that no other project group used, the whole shebang) would earn us some bonus points, which it did. Though, I don't consider a desktop app an "embedded system", you could argue that it interacts with one. At the end, the professor asked us "if you had 100 points to divide between the two of you, how would you divide them?". 60/40, I said, 60 for my teammate and 40 for me, since he did most of the actual embedded systems-related work. Made sense to me. Instead, both my teammate and the professor said 50/50, because we both put a lot of effort in it, learned new things, and ended up with good results. The professor even said that I should be more confident in my skills. I just don't classify a desktop app as "embedded", is that hard to understand?

The Labview project is coming along nicely, the web client is as good as finished, the Labview VI itself has a timing issue where it kept invoking an event, even when it was technically not triggered. I hope I can fix the issue before winter break starts.

Most other projects are a nightmare at the moment, so I'm looking forward to having more time to spend on them. I haven't looked at my industrial automation project for two weeks now. Oops.

At least I found a nice Lip Service jacket on a second hand website. I kind of want to overhaul my entire wardrobe, throw out t-shirts I never wear anymore, and adopt a slightly different style. At the same time, I know myself good enough by now, I'll probably keep wearing simple black jeans and t-shirts all my life.

My webpage works! Kind of.

I've been working on a project where I have to make a webserver communicate with an external system and a web client. I've written a Labview program that controls a function generator and an oscilloscope, and sends their parameter values to my web server through HTTP-requests, where it is parsed and added to a SQL database. The web client does the same, through an AJAX-request. Both systems should also periodically pull data from the database to keep data up-to-date. This way, the measurement instruments can be controlled from both clients. Not sure how this could be useful in any way, but at least I met the requirements for the project.

I'm not sure if I should leave it at that, or add more functionalities, such as a login page with new account creation, or a graph where the scope image is displayed. My CSS could use some work too. However, I have six projects in total this semester, and at least this one and an embedded systems project with a PSoC5 are almost finished, but the others still have a lot of work to do.

The webpage project did spark an idea: get my own domain name (uni provided us with this dmonain name and server specially for this project), and use it as an online resume, with maybe a section for a travel blog. Domain names are relatively cheap, webhosting shouldn't be too expensive either. Flex on my future employers, show off personal projects, that sort of thing.