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Laudatory honors

That's me up at the podium. (I got to give a speech.)

They line us up by major and in alphabetical order before we process behind a bagpiper out into the hall. By virtue of the alphabet, I'm next to Ratso. The departmental secretary bustles around, passing out little cards, with our names and any laudatory honors for the dean to read as we cross the stage, and arranging our hoods so that the school colors are properly displayed. When Humility Boy (all his regalia is fearfully disordered) asks her if she'll miss us, she rolls her eyes and says, "Well, yes, but maybe now I can get some work done!"

Ratso shows me his name card, with his name misspelled, but sort of phonetically, so he's hoping that the dean will pronounce it somewhat right. On my card, my name is spelled right, but my middle initial, which I left off the "how do you want to be called" form is there and really, I'd prefer my whole middle name to just "L", but obviously those forms were ignored. Ratso reads my card and says, "Hey, you got a sumo cum laude!"

"Hah!" I clench my hands into fists and drop into a horse stance. "Yeah, sumo cum laude. I get a special belt." (My fighting name could be Taka-no-seiseki.)

"Oh, sum-MA. What's that mean anyway? I got a magma cum laude."

Yeah, his grades were positively volcanic! Actually, all but a couple of the computer engineers had very high grades. I'm impressed with them all. (Geezer note: When I was their age, I was too flighty to have gotten through this program at all, much less with honors. It's a good thing I did languages and linguistics—at which I did quite well, thank you very much—the first time around.)

Then the piper starts playing Loch Lomond and out we go.

The results are in

All my final grades are in and I still have a 4.0! This is after seven years (full and part time) of work towards this degree, with one semester off for good behavior. Yeah, I know that on the Internet everyone and their mother has a 4.0. Well, I have one too.

Not that this matters to my clients.

I've had a couple translation jobs come in this week. I've told the project managers, "Yes! I'm even more qualified to do this job than before—I completed a bachelor's in computer engineering just last week!"

Their response: "Oh… Anyway, can you get this done by Tuesday?"

Yes, this has definitely been seven years and $30,000 well spent.

Now 100% homework-free!

Today I took my final final. The ultimate final of this whole BSCE process. And now I'm done. And I'm not doing homework. Hah.

Finals

I'm studying for finals. I have one on Monday and one on Wednesday. Then I'll be done.

End of the tunnel

Or of a tunnel, anyway.

I just spent about two hours editing our humongous Hamster paper. The final Final Paper, as opposed to the evidently-not-really-final Final Paper that we had to turn in two weeks ago to the senior seminar professor and the God-why-the-hell-isn't-this-final Final Paper that we turned in last week to the departmental chair.

And this isn't the end of the Hamsters for me, oh no, because (1) I have to go over all of the operating details with Dr. Smith and the next student who's going to be working with Dr. Science this summer on something else but you know he's going to end up getting stuck with Hamsters too, and (2) I may be co-oping down at the research facility on some other project, but you know they'll be calling me over whenever anything comes up (because walking-talking documentation is better than the kind you have to read).

The big demo for real

Yesterday, about a half hour before the deadline, we demonstrate the complete working Hamster system to Dr. Flight. We were ready earlier, of course, but Dr. Flight was busy, then he was gone, then he was busy again, then he had to eat a snack. Finally, still chewing, he comes into the lab and we point out all the features: synchronized data, weather station integrated into the interface, etc. Ratso spins the anemometer and wiggles the weathervane so he can see the little gauges on the interface jump.

"Okay."

He leaves.

"Well, that was the most anticlimactic thing ever," says Ratso.

"Well, I sat in on the demo by last year's team. It lasted a lot longer because their version wasn't working," I tell him.

The big demo

My senior project

Tomorrow is the big day. Today could have been the big day, but when Ratso went to ask Dr. Flight if he'd like to see the Hamster demo a day early, Dr. Flight evinced no interest in seeing it a minute before he had to. Not that I can blame him. Look at it. The Hamsters are the green cards with all the wires hanging off.

When I go into the lab this afternoon, Mountain Girl and Ratso are working on the final report (or committing copyright violations on the school's wireless network).

"Did you get a new microcontroller from Dr. Smith?" I ask, wheeling my bookbag into the corner.

"Uh, no. Don't we need a new A/D too?" Ratso asks.

"No. Cali-boy and I fished one of the 'bad' ones out of the trash and it was okay. It only seemed to be bad because we using it with a bad microcontroller. So if you get a new microcontroller, we can get the system running with all three Hamsters and the Weather Hamster."

"Okay." Ratso vanishes out the door and reappears a minute (only a minute!) later with a fresh microcontroller. We program it and power everything up.

It all works! We don't get the magic smoke or anything.

Beer for breakfast

Is not too horrible if you have breakfast at 6:30 pm after working all day. Although it doesn't leave you in good shape for preparing lunch.

Yes, it was another fun Sunday in the lab. With just a little bit more to go with the Hamsters, we decided to get it over with. We had to get the Weather Hamster collecting data from two sensors and communicating properly with the PC, all without disrupting the rest of the system which was working correctly.

This doesn't sound too bad, in theory. In practice, we spent three hours troubleshooting faulty hardware. Once we finally swapped out a microcontroller that would not for love or money write out a bit to Port E Bit 1, things began to go a little better. Also encountered: lack of analog voltage source for the A/D converter, totally non-functional A/D converter, timing issues with the A/D… Obviously the A/D was the source of most of our problems.

With the lack of spare parts, I was very conservative about cannibalizing working Hamsters, lest we end up having no working system at all to demonstrate on Tuesday.

Ratso tried to desolder an old A/D converter from a partially destroyed board, but destroyed the A/D in the process. "Whoops! I bent it."

I finally let them pull a working A/D from its socket on a working board. Once we had a full set of working hardware for the Weather Hamster, everything started working (funny how that is) and it was just a matter of cleaning up the software. Stupid mistakes like setting a port as an output and then trying to read something into it.

The whole system is pretty much done now. We'd better demo for our advisors before someone breathes on it.

Poster sessions

It's great to get these milestones knocked off.

Today was the day for all the senior project groups to show off their designs with a poster and any other appropriate displays. The guys who designed and built a paintball gun (reportedly able to shoot over 40 rounds per minute at some painful velocity) did their demo outside in an area marked off with police tape. Most of the rest of us were indoors with our posters. All my group had to show off was a couple circuit boards and a slide show running on Ratso's laptop. Along with the UAV group, we took over one corner of the lobby. They had the eye-catching planes and assorted (borrowed) laptops running video recorded from some of the successful flights. I noticed they didn't have the video from the plane that crashed, although they did have a bit of its tail on display in memoriam thereof. Also on display was the little Hot Wheels plane I got them as a pity plane after the crash. (Aww.) They were waving it around, talking about mini-UAVs, and pecking people with its nosecone.

Another group had a neat project that I hadn't heard of. They designed a system with both hardware and software elements that would recognize a song sung into it by a user, pull the song out of a database, and play it.

My team took turns explaining our project to visitors, including parents, cousins, friends, professors, and deans. I think my head will explode if I have to give the spiel one more time.

Beyond the prototype

Mountain Girl and I have a working prototype of our smart Hamster synchronizer. We're being very careful of it, because we need to demonstrate a working system next Tuesday. In the meantime, we have a new toy: a real printed circuit board version of our cobbled-together synchronizer. The blank boards came in this week. Today Mountain Girl put the components on them: sockets, resistors, capacitors, headers, etc. We had to do a few modifications because the layout guy missed a few ground islands, leaving some pins not connected to anything. It looks pretty slick, if I do say so myself. It plugs into an FPGA board that manages the Ethernet connections and interrupts, and the whole setup is very compact. It's shiny too.

Once we check out the power situation (we already resolved a short from power to ground) to ensure that no chips will be fried under normal operating conditions, we'll drop line drivers into the sockets and take it out for a spin. Maybe we'll even be able to use it in our Tuesday demo.

Working devices

We're back at the probe station, jabbing little metal probes on the wafers. The earlier problems with the station having been straightened out (anomalous readings were the result of crossed cables), we're seeing more reasonable performances from the devices.

"Hey, those look good!" The professor points out the current-voltage curves on the screen. "What wafer was this again?"

"Wafer 4."

"Great. Now let's see if we can find a 10 micron device that works." He scans over the wafer to a teeny-tiny transistor and drops the probes onto it. This transistor has the same threshold voltage as the bigger working devices and the really nice current-voltage curves. "Okay! Wafer 4 is going down in history. Let's see if a 5 micron transistor works."

The 5 micron transistor doesn't work. Its parts don't seem to be aligned quite well enough. We check devices located on different regions of the wafer, but get no joy.

The professor still loves Wafer 4. We move on to another wafer and look for working 5 micron transistors there.

I have to ask. "So what if you find just one 5 micron transistor that works? Are you going to say you have a 5 micron process then?"

"Well, no? We'll see why that one worked and make adjustments to the process to try and get the yield up. We may need to adjust the dimensions and maybe improve the alignment marks."

Proof of the pudding

On Monday, all graduating seniors in the department of electrical and computer engineering have to submit a CD containing various assignments we've done over the years. Students in the other departments don't have to do this. This year the pressure is really on us computer engineering students because we are the class of record for our program's attempt to get accreditation.

I've got all my material together and now I'm giving it one last proofreading before I convert all the files to pdf's as required. I've observed that, oddly enough, the work has grown somewhat less polished over time as fatigue takes its toll. Part of the problem is that we've had to do paper after paper on the Hamster project, all of them basically the same but slightly different, until we're finally driven mad and allowed to graduate.

Terms of address

"Is 'Master' the right term of address for an unmarried male?" The King of Comedy is over in the corner of the Sun lab working on, I guess, a business letter.

"An unmarried male what?" I ask, because with the KoC it's good to clarify these things.

He squints at me. "Person."

"No, 'Master' has more to do with levels of formality. Like if I were your butler, I might address you as Master." I resist the temptation to launch into a lecture on Japanese honorifics. There's one itching to pop out.

"Yeah, but… Okay, if Bruce Wayne got married, then his butler would address him as 'Mister'?" The KoC runs with it.

Oh, yeah. Like Bruce Wayne would get married. He'd have to move to Massachusetts. I stifle my smirk and continue. "No. Men are addressed as 'Mister' regardless of their marital status. Whether anyone calls them 'Master' is a separate issue."

"Oh. Okay. But then what's the deal with 'Miss' and 'Mrs.'?"

We discuss, with situational examples. But really, san would be so much simpler.

Our own devices

After a semester of processing wafers to build PMOS devices, it's now time for us to test the wafers and see if they actually work. I'm a member of the Tuesday lab group, but I'm attending the Monday lab because I'll be out of town tomorrow.

"That's cheating," the King of Comedy says after I justify my presence to him.

"No, it's not."

Once enough of the real Monday lab people show up, with various interruptions from others (including the Out-Holder who drops in to ask about developer, because the new developer he's using is totally stripping all the resist of the wafers, thus undoing all that lithography), we begin. Because the test equipment is delicate, participation in this lab involves watching the professor take measurements and hearing a few anecdotes about odd, observed effects that turned out to be nifty tunneling devices and other accidental discoveries.

"Like Otto Tittslinger, who invented the brassiere," the KoC puts in.

To the tune of neaner-neaner I sing, "You watch chick films."

"Hey, Beaches is, like, my favorite movie. I even have the soundtrack," KoC says.

"How old are you?" I demand. "That movie came out in 1990." (1988, actually. I just checked.)

"I'm very mature for my age," he says.

Now that gets a laugh.

"So anyway, the resistance of Wafer 4 is 800 ohms per square, which is consistent with it having the longer drive-in, but then Wafer 2 that had the fifteen minute drive-in had the same… Huh. Let's take some more measurements." The professor puts another wafer on the probe.

We all dutifully record the measurements. Some wafers have a lot of variance: 300 ohms per square in one spot, 900 in another, with these spots being rather close together. Then it's time to measure the devices on another delicate test device. We start by checking the resistance of some of the resistors.

The professor says, "Okay. Now this resistor is a ten square resistor and we measured 500 ohms per square for this wafer, so what should the resistance be?"

"5000 ohms."

"It's 47 kilo-ohms," someone reads from the screen.

Students pace around the lab and grumble under their breaths. It's really amusing how they thought that somehow this was all going to work. Where did they intern that stuff works on the first try?

"Let's try it again with the light off." The professor touches the switch. The light is to help position the probes on the contacts, but reacts with the silicon enough to mess up the readings.

"132 mega-ohms."

"Woo! Light-sensitive resistors!"

"Nobel Prize!"

The professor is shaking his head. "No. I think I'm going to have to check these probes out. I think there must be something wrong, either with the probes or maybe the contacts are misaligned. Anyway, for your lab notebooks, you should all do the calculations to figure out what the values should be."

The KoC gets serious. "Professor. This whole semester's been a lie, hasn't it?"

Fish in a barrel

Troubleshooting is an acquired skill and more than half an art. One thing it isn't: throwing one's hands in the air and saying, "I can't tell what's wrong. You figure it out. You know this stuff."

I need to figure out how to transmit this wisdom to the boys in my project team. I can't tell if they are genuinely clueless or if they're pretending so that I'll "show them how" by doing their work for them. The problem with their strategy is that we are running out of time and Mountain Girl and I have other things to do. There's also the small matter that she and I don't have some mystical, all-encompassing knowledge of the Hamsters, although it might look like it to someone who gives up at the first little Hamster tantrum.

Willfully stupid or stupidly willful?

Resting on the computer in the lab, I find two sheets of paper, paperclipped together, with a post-it note from Dr. Smith: "Check these carefully."

Care is not necessary. The errors are obvious.

This is the schematic and circuit board layout for the smart synchronizer. All the material that we provided, the schematic, notes, a drawing of how we wanted the layout to be—why did we bother?

"I can't believe anyone would be this willfully stupid," I comment.

Pinocchio volunteers that he would be, so hey.

"Not even you."

Mountain Girl looks over everything. "This is hilarious! They had to go to a lot of trouble to short out all those connectors and wire up the LEDs backwards! Why would they even think we'd want to do that?"

"Maybe they think we're really stupid?"

Our board has two 40-pin connectors that are going to connect to two other connectors on an FPGA development board. Somehow, that didn't quite get through to the layout person, who put four 40-pin connectors and shorted them together in two pairs.

"Look, they changed the values of all the capacitors too."

This has me wondering about all the emphasis prospective employers put on good written communication skills. Why is it important if no one ever reads anything? Or even looks at the pictures!

We have to get all this straightened out before we can have the boards made. I haven't seen Dr. Smith since I found the papers. I think he took one look at the schematic and suddenly remembered some pressing thing to do in Hampton for the rest of the week. Or, as Oz puts it, he took one look at the schematic and thought, "Oh, no! She's going to fuss at me. I get enough of that shit at home!"

Time in

The guys are leaving the building as I arrive for class. "Hey! How are you?"

"Grouchy," I say. I have been for the last couple days.

"Well, we have good news! We got the microcontroller programmed for that one sensor! We thought we'd never get it done—"

"Yeah, we were stuck, so we just asked Dr. Smith and he straightened us out in, like, fifteen minutes!"

That is cheering. "Great! What's next?" There's so much more to do.

"We showed Dr. Flight and he says that before we do the next sensor, we should get it talking to the base station."

That's what Mountain Girl and I have been working on all week. We've been making the progress of the slow loris. It's been excruciating. "You guys want to do that? That'll be fine with us," I tell them.

They exchange a glance and shrug. "Okay. As long as we can ask you stuff, since you know more about that part of it. Let's meet on Monday."

"Sure." We head on our separate ways. After my class, I go up to the lab to meet Mountain Girl for our usual afternoon coding and debugging session. We've been working on a "skeleton" for the weather station code to handle the connectivity of the microcontroller to the PC and on the PC end we've been modifying the base station code to load in and display the weather data. If we can get it working, the boys can probably just paste their code into the skeleton, and then deal with the host of problems that'll cause.

Mountain Girl designed some nifty gauges for the interface. It looks great, but the needles on the gauges aren't moving. The problems that remain are (1) something mysterious with the TCP/IP connection, (2) the data types aren't right except that they are, (3) the dummy data generating routine isn't acting like we think it is (although I think we got that fixed), and (4) something stupid we haven't thought of, because there always is.

She's already heard from the guys about their success of the morning.

"They want to take over the communications part. I think we should let them," I tell her. "So let's make it a short day today."

"Okay."

The first thing we try is slowing down the data transmission rate. I modify the microcontroller so that it only sends out one packet per second instead of thousands. Now when the system runs, the data are picked up and we don't get an error on the TCP line. But. The data are being incremented not by one, but by 512.

512 is a lovely number, that's two to the power of nine, and so very, very suggestive.

The Hamsters are little endian creatures, while the software used to create the base station (written by Mac dweebs) is big endian. This refers to the order in which the bytes of data are stored. When your data is two bytes wide, but your memory is only one byte wide, you have to break your data in half and store one half first: the big end or the little end. I used a byte swapping function in the base station to handle this, but the byte swapper is not working, as witnessed by our increments of 512. That's our increment showing up in the wrong byte.

I delete the byte swapper and replace it with a rotate bits function, which does the same thing, except that the rotate bits function works. This time, we run the system and the data are picked up, and we don't get an error, and the data are incremented by—two. (Mathematically astute people would have realized that the increment of one to the high byte would have shown up as an increment of 256.)

"Does that matter?" asks Mountain Girl as we watch the data tick in, incremented by twos. "It's only weather and they don't need it to be that precise."

"Well, it's probably something simple. If the Hamster is sending data, then the PC ought to be receiving it." I consider our logic and set the base station to check the weather Hamster's connection twice as often, then sit back in my chair and watch the data load in, properly and with no missing samples. "So how long did that take? Fifteen minutes?"

"And all the hours we've put in this week."

Did I not get the memo?

I get to my digital design class early. I'm the first one there, so I turn on the lights, park my bag, and wander over to the window where I can admire the park and how the trees are greening up.

A few minutes pass. I'm still all alone. This is a little unusual; normally people start trickling in about this time. After a few more minutes, I take a brisk walk down through the department and see (1) no one in the labs and (2) the professor hunched in front of his computer and typing madly. He's got that "preparing for class at the last minute" look, so I figure we're having class.

The classroom is still empty.

Right at the time class is supposed to start, Guy with Too Many Cats comes in. "What's going on? Where is everybody?"

"I don't know. Was there an email I didn't get?"

"I didn't get it either." He sits down and we chat about Senior Projects, progress, and the lack thereof.

A few minutes after that, Dr. Flight shows up and the No Show King follows him into the room.

"Where is everybody?" Dr. Flight pulls the overhead projector into position and opens his box of transparencies. "We are having class today."

A couple more people come in.

The rest of us verbally abuse them for a while.

"Okay." Dr. Flight takes charge. "So there's only, like, 50% of the class here. I have to go down to NASA today, so I was going to make it a short class anyway. I take it there would be no objections if I let you have this as a project work day?"

No objections.

A couple more people come in as the rest of us are picking up our stuff.

Foiled!

Having finished our smart Hamster synchronizer, Mountain Girl and I are moving on, but the smart synchronizer has not yet released its hold on us. Dr. Smith offered to have a printed circuit board version of our design made up, so we duly worked up a schematic, a parts list, notes about the needed layout, and collected a batch of references. Then we sent it all to him. All of it, let me repeat. Because I figured he'd be wandering in and out of the lab, asking for more bits and pieces, and this way, whatever he asks for, we can just tell him that he already has it.

I'm too clever for my own good.

"Can you send me the parts list?"

"We already did. It's in the spreadsheet; each part of the project has its own worksheet." I am smug.

"Can you separate out the parts list?"

Still smug. "We already did. It's in the notes we wrote for whoever does the layout."

"I didn't read that. Can you separate out the parts list?"

I wilt. "Okay."

Ask and you shall receive

The boys are whining about the flakey microprocessor they're trying to program. In fact, the microprocessor is not flakey, but the documentation describing the internal timer structure thereof is quite opaque and they can't figure out how to make it do what they want. They are also behind on this part of the Hamster project, partly because they had some tasks they needed to get done first. Mostly because they didn't like those tasks and so they dragged their heels instead of getting them over with.

And now?

"This doesn't work. The clock speed isn't constant. How are we supposed to time anything with it?"

"Read the documentation. How are you measuring it?" I call back over the carrel from where Mountain Girl and I are struggling with the communications end of the problem (which, our part of the project being done (as in "completely finished except for proofreading our part of the paper"), constitutes picking up their slack).

"How can we divide down the timer? How fast is this clock supposed to be anyway?"

"Read the documentation. Or ask a professor." Who'll tell you to read the documentation, but whatever.

"This is awful! How can we work with this thing?"

"Hey, guys. Remember 'We don't want to do this analog stuff. We want to work on the weather station'?" I can do a fair imitation of them.

"Uh."

They leave the lab, return and code some more. Complain. They leave the lab again. Return. Try something else. Leave the lab. Return, followed by Dr. Flight who spends forty-five minutes or so straightening them out.

I'm kind of enjoying this.

Timing out

The best way to figure out what's going on with a signal is to put it on an LED and look at it. If your signals are being naughty, they shape right up and start behaving. This makes it hard to diagnose any problems, but at least you can see the signals acting right.

I did this today with some counters I was trying to make count. Instead of right-acting signals, I got a Las Vegas type of effect, which was kind of exciting, but hardly illuminating. This time, the process of getting the signals into some kind of form that was compatible with the LEDs ended up solving the problem.

You can never have too many LEDs.

No fooling

Stuff is working.

Mountain Girl got the synchronizer all put together. I found it on the bench this morning, plugged in the line drivers, plugged the synchronizer into the FPGA board and it worked like a dream, especially after I fixed some bad logic. (There's a bit more that needs more fixing. Tomorrow. Because I live in the lab.)

This afternoon, she tells me how when she finished it, she proudly showed it to Dr. Smith. "And he looked at it and said he'd seen better wire wrap jobs. I was so mad! I think for a first effort it's pretty good."

"I think it's great. It worked when I plugged it in. Did you tell him that it was Pinocchio who taught you how to wire wrap?"

When Cali-boy shows up, we get him to complete his parts list and test his circuit. He got this filter/amplifier combination working (finally), but hadn't plugged it into a Hamster board to see if it worked for real.

"Better test it." I almost don't want to know, in case it doesn't.

"You think I should solder it onto some perf board?"

"I think we should test it in the breadboard before we commit to solder."

Once we figure out a way to connect everything, we run a test and his circuit works to spec. Yes! We call people in to see. Witnesses are good. We take a screen capture of the waveform.

And the fourth member of the team?

"So, where's Ratso?"

"He hasn't been in today."

"Slacker."

So not quite everything is working. Yet.

Drop dead dates

I was wondering why not much was happening with Cali-boy and Ratso's parts of the Hamster project. Ratso got stuck with writing an extra software application to reformat the Hamster data, so I expected that he'd be behind. Cali-boy had kind of a not very fun analog thing to do, which I expected he'd get over with so he could work on the fun digital stuff. This did not happen.

Last week I took a closer look at our countdown and it came to my attention that we have to turn in a draft of our final report by 20 April. This means that we have to have something to report on before then. I made up a to-do list for us and set some deadlines.

"This Friday," I told Cali-boy over the weekend.

He had his circuit working on Tuesday.

Gah! Humans!

Why didn't I lay down the law weeks ago? Although he might not have listened then. Right now I have the weight of doom to back me up.

Missing parts

Wire wrap boards are a hot commodity in the computer engineering department. I had a batch of them that Dr. Smith ordered last summer. All semester, Pinocchio has been coming into my lab and begging on bended knee for these boards which are just what he needs for his project.

Last time, I said, "Look, this is our last spare. These last two we need for our project. If you need more, you have to get the departmental secretary or the supplies guy to order you some."

"But I don't know the part number!"

"It's printed on the board."

"But I can't order from Digilent. They'll only let me order from Digikey."

"They'll order from Digilent! Where do you think these came from?"

Today, during Dr. Smith's perambulations through the labs, he told me that he'd be placing orders, so if I needed anything, I should let him know. The next time I see Pinocchio, I grab our last wire wrap board and haul Pinocchio into Dr. Smith's office.

"We need more of these!" I wave the board. "We need a couple for our project and Pinocchio needs some for his project too."

This precipitates some discussion to determine that we actually need these particular boards and not some cheaper option, but the result is that we'll be getting more boards.

Later, I say to Pinocchio, "Now was that so hard? All you have to do is ask."

"But he wanted to know what I was doing with them! What does he think I'm doing with them? He was at my critical design review. I showed them the board I was working on…"

Breathing lead

One of the many fun things about soldering components onto a wire wrap board.

We've done enough testing on the hardware for the smart synchronizer that we are ready to commit to solder. Up to now, we've been working with what looks like a bilious mass of spaghetti, piled on a breadboard and loosely held together with banana plugs. I'm actually quite amazed that it works at all.

For the past week, Mountain Girl and I have been getting together a schematic, verifying all the pinouts, and making notes about the synchronizer. Dr. Smith has even said he'll have a printed circuit board version of it made up, which will plug in to the FPGA development board and look all professional-like. If we give him all the design information tomorrow, we'll get the PCB…sometime after graduation? In the meantime, however, we need a stable prototype for more testing and development, so it's time for us to brush up our lame soldering skills.

We really only did soldering in one intro level class, years ago. You'd think the curriculum might emphasize assembly as well as design, but I guess there's no time. So here we are, saying rude words as the solder balls up on the soldering iron and not on the pins. This is the easy part. Once we get all the components soldered onto the board, we'll have to wire them up.

"It's going to be mind-numbing," Mountain Girl says with authority.

Sky busters!

So, I pass Woolstar's remark about the "Unmanned Autonomous Posthole Digger" on to Skipper, who fails to be cheered. He looks stricken and I immediately feel guilty. "But I really hope you all get it finished…"

Anyway, after I finish up in the lab, Oz and I go get lunch and errands. We pick up various necessaries at Target and can't avoid walking past the toys and electronics. While Oz fondles cellphone chargers, I wander into the next aisle and the Hot Wheels display catches my eye. Die cast stealth fighter jets for just US$1.97. We get one.

When I run into the lab later, Skipper and Pinocchio are still working. I fly the plane in its bubble pack over to them. "Look! A new airplane, just for you."

"What's this? A new UAV?" Skipper picks it up.

"Yes! A new UAV! UAV-5!" Pinocchio raises a fist into the air.

"UAV-5!"

You guys are going through these really fast.

Show and tell

My lab has three doors: one to the hall way and two into the neighboring labs. Most of the time, the door to the lab where the guys are working on DOGS is open. The other door has never been open. There is a sign on it, hand lettered with magic marker: "Keep this door closed at all times." I sit with my back to this door.

I'm coding away at the Hamsters and suddenly I hear a voice over my shoulder. The door had opened!

"Do you have any capacitors?"

I turn around and see a guy, another one of us older students, standing in the doorway of The Door That Must Not Be Opened.

He explains. "We're working down in 205. We're having some noise problems and we just need a little one, maybe a hundredth of a microfarad." 205 is at the far end of the hall. He must have passed through every lab between here and there.

"Sure. The capacitors are in here." I lead him into the DOGS lab and show him the cabinet of components over by where the guys are working on their flight simulator, the graphic display of which shows the plane embedded in the ground. Everyone offers him a capacitor and he takes his leave, thanking us, with a collection of them.

I also sit with my back to a little table saw and a drill press. The people down in 205 have been in and out, via the hallway door, all semester to cut things up. Today they've been slicing apart a perfboard. They cut it in half, leave, return in fifteen minutes, cut off another piece, et cetera. Perfboard smells when it's getting cut up.

They're back again. "We're going to make some more noise."

"That's okay." I turn around and eye the table saw. "You know, there was a safety guard on that thing. We took it off early in the semester because what we were cutting couldn't fit under it. I think it's still around. Somewhere." I stand up and poke aimlessly through some lab detritus.

"Oh, no. Those things just get in the way. Besides, I haven't lost a finger yet. But I'm working on it. See, I sort of drilled my finger." One of them holds up his hand to show me.

Before I can see more of a yucky spot on the indicated appendage, I cover my eyes and cry, "No! Don't show me. Euw!"

They think this is really funny. It takes a while, but finally they stop comparing accidental body perforations, cut up their perfboard some more, and go.

Skywalker appears at the hallway door with a clutch of hand tools. "Have you seen a bicycle floating around?"

God, I love Fridays.

A bicycle floating around would be much remarked upon, especially by the summarily grounded DOGS team. "A bicycle? Floating?"

"Yeah. Green? Huffy? We're using it for a club project. We left it in 205, but it's not there now. So I figured someone might have moved it," he says, glancing around at the battered fridge, stacks of computers and airplane wings, and scraps of projects from students gone by.

"Nope. Sorry."

"Oh well." He doesn't seem much disturbed by this and continues on his quest.

I wonder if I should go see what's going on in 205.

Low blows

The project in the next lab is a UAV (whatever that stands for. It's an autonomous model airplane). Pinocchio decided to call it the Dynamic Over Ground System (DOGS). Every time someone mentions the name, Skipper sputters, "But it doesn't mean anything! It's meaningless!"

They've had some problems getting it off the ground. All this semester, the weather has not been cooperative. On the days when they go to fly, it's raining, or too windy, or something. Last time, the weather was cooperative.

The instrumentation was not.

The GPS altimeter failed and the little airplane decided that it needed to descend. Immediately. Abruptly.

They had to dig it out of the ground. The battery, which sits at the back of the instrument compartment, had slid forward, down through the instrumentation, so the bits that hadn't failed are now bits of bits.

Word got around. Faculty members talk to each other, it seems. In the seminar class a few days later, the professor was going over the different requirements for the senior projects and mentioned how we should have our project ready to display for the open house. "But if your project has taken a dive, you'll have to think of something else. And if you're running into design problems, or you find that your design has crashed and burned…"

A little biased

Tell. Us. What. You. Want.

It's a good thing the guys from the research facility aren't around because I'd be shaking them by their necks.

Ratso finally completed his file formatter software. The researchers provided us a little program for analyzing the formatted files so that we could be sure that we were getting them in the right format. We couldn't just send them the software without testing it, after all. (We really wanted to. We want to get this over with.)

So we tested it and found that, while the waveform we graphed was recognizable as the waveform data we collected, it was seriously distorted. After cursing and trying some stuff that didn't work, it was back to asking questions that no one knows the answer to. The information about formatting that we had finally managed to extract from them didn't mention that the data had to be in a certain format. 16 bit integers are not all created equal.

The first answer we got was, naturally, "try some stuff."

I have learned not to take that for an answer.

I asked again, we tracked down the person who knows, and got a real answer. All we had to do was add a certain number to the values we collected to get an integer compatible with their software. And that took much less time than "trying stuff."

The lab that will not end

"The last time we went through all these steps, it didn't take this long."

"That's because last time they didn't have the stripper in stock, so we couldn't do all the steps."

"Oh."

"What's wrong with the aligner?"

"And why is it hot pink, anyway? I want to put Hello Kitty stickers on it."

We hover around the aligner while the TA scrutinizes the instructions and tentatively pokes buttons. We take turns fiddling around with the various joysticks and squint into the microscope to see if the mask and wafer line up. They don't. This happens after we try to measure oxide layer thicknesses with the Filmetrics machine that also is not working today. Our lab notebooks are woefully blank, but we do save time in all the subsequent steps where we're supposed to measure oxide thickness.

"Why can't they get us a decent aligner? How much did they just spend on that stupid new cafeteria that I can't even afford to eat at? A billion dollars! And we have to do lab with broken equipment!"

This lab takes three hours. On the upside, my protocol jumpsuit was missing, so I snagged a size M one from the stock and got to wear a suit that actually fit.

Speaking in public

I have a little touch of laryngitis, too, which doesn't help.

Today we have our Critical Design Review, in which we present (with PowerPoint, because they are gluttons for punishment and asked us to) our professors with the current status of our senior design project. They are then critical. We actually came through okay with that, although Dr. Smith had lots of suggestions that had to be fielded graciously. Screaming "No! Not more suggestions!" not being an option. Not right now, anyway, but give me a few more weeks…

Once that's over and my brain is partially fried, I run downstairs to drop off my resume with the recruiters from Division of Large Chemical Company who are hanging out in the lobby today. As I am expecting that they will glance at the resume and direct me to the company website, I am caught off guard when they are sociable and want to talk with me. My poor brain lurches around, fixates on how this Division of Large Chemical Company is a joint venture with a Japanese company (and I should have done a little background research on them so I wouldn't sound like a total idiot, but we were preparing for the CDR), and compels me to brightly mention, "Hey! I speak Japanese and I have over ten years of experience translating patents for the exact kinds of stuff you manufacture, among other things!"

I am even more caught off guard when these people are actually interested. Thus far recruiters, even from companies that have design and manufacturing facilities in Japan, have appeared to view my skill set as a variant of smallpox inasmuch as they smile nervously and edge away.

So I chat and am sociable. I end up talking with the whole crowd and am proffered business cards. I try not to cough on them.

Making the list

And checking it twice.

They sent out the list of graduating seniors. I'm on it this time! I wasn't on the first iteration (frantic visit to advisor ensues: "What else do I have to do to get out of here?"), but my advisor must have gotten all the paperwork in on time. Now all I have to do is get nothing less than a C this semester and I'm free! I can manage that. (I'll be happier about it when I can stop fretting about the dumb stuff I did—or think I did—on the microfabrication midterm.)

It's like being a short-timer except that two months in Engineering School Time is a lot longer than two months of normal life.

It works!

Today I finally got the code straightened out. The smart synchronizer I've been designing for the Hamsters has thus far not been very smart. I've gotten the pretty LEDs to light up and all, but I haven't been getting any data out of the Hamsters. Today I got data! All that remained was to generate proper interrupt pulses out to the Hamsters so that the critters would collect some data. I wrote the logic for that, fired everything up and finally, for the first time in weeks, we had Hamster data scrolling across the display. And it was perfectly synchronized.

Ace Rabinowitz, ME Detective

Carrying a bottle of Mountain Dew, Mountain Girl comes back into the lab. "So I just got this out of the vending machine, but the safety seal band around the bottom of the cap is missing. Do you think it's safe to drink? Or did the person who stocked the machine open it and put something in it?"

Here ensues a discussion of bottle-capping and the difficulty of getting those safety bands off. Much is hypothesized about the soda bottling process and the bottle is passed around. MG decides that she'll just go get another bottle.

"Let me see it," says Ace. "I can prove that it's safe." (It's really too bad I can't use his own name, because it's the perfect name for him and a cool name. Seriously, if I put him in a lineup and told you to pick out the guy whose name is _____ _______, you'd pick him in a heartbeat.)

"Oh yeah? You can show that it's mechanically safe?" I ask.

"Yeah, mechanically safe." Ace is really EE, only minoring in ME, so he didn't have to get the lobotomy.

MG hands over the bottle and he examines the base of the cap. He shows it to me. "The last thing they do is stamp the date on the cap. See here? You can see where they stamped the date on—there's some ink on the edge of the cap. And right below it on the neck of the bottle is the ink from the rest of the date." Indeed, the inked spots line up perfectly.

"Great. I'm still not drinking it," MG says.

"Can I have it?" Ace asks.

"Sure." She goes back down to the vending machines.

He opens the bottle, which emits a satisfying, carbonated hiss. There's a free song under the cap too.

How can that be?

"But I thought your laptop was surgically attached," I cry. I'm in a state of shock, standing here in the parking lot where I've run into Ratso (on foot, not in car).

"Well, it was. But I left it at home today," he says.

All the data is (or "are" if we're being Latin) on the laptop.

Okay, backstory: Our new Hamster system generates data in a different format from the old system. Dr. Science et al. want to plug the Hamster data into the software they've been using to analyze data from the old system to see if it's "the same" (or at least similar if collected under similar conditions). After we set up the Hamsters down there, they suddenly started demanding a piece of software to convert the data into this format that nobody really knows what it is. Anyway, since Ratso's part of the rest of the project hadn't started up yet, I stuck him with it because he's the one who does Visual C# and I knew he'd hunch over his laptop for hours at a time, even during classes, once he got started.

Yes, I am evil. Taking advantage of a young man's obsessive compulsive disorder like that.

But he's done now and we need to test the files he generated with some of Dr. Science's software to be sure Ratso's conversion program works right before we send it down there. And we can't do it today, obviously, if the only copy of the software is somewhere out in the West End.

I bet he doesn't even have it backed up.

I am "cool"

Pinocchio comes into the auditorium for the seminar class. He steps over a row of chairs, as I am so inconsiderately sitting at the aisle and blocking the end, and settles in near me.

"I saw someone cutting wires on the Hamsters," he says.

"Did you stop them?" I know better than to react.

"Really! Someone was cutting wires and bending the microcontroller modules to see if they could bend," he insists.

"Didn't you hit them?"

"They were breaking things in half!" He opens his eyes wider as if that makes him more believable.

"And you didn't stop them? Why not?"

"The door was locked. But I banged on the window, they were cutting wires…"

"Oh, you know how to get into that lab." I roll my eyes.

From behind my chair, where he's hiding with his laptop near a power outlet, Smiley calls to me, "You are cool. Like —" (Here he kind of mumbles and I don't quite catch it.)

"Like what?" I twist around and peer down at him.

"It's from a game," he says.

"Oh. Okay." I guess.

Some of the other guys nod along with him. And smile. Even Pinocchio.

It would be really cool if I could remember the game he named and get some confirmation on this.

Vacuum chuck

More fun in the clean room.

Today we are spinning glass. In order to get some boron ions into our wafers, we have to put some onto the wafers first, in the form of a liquid boron-silicon mixture. The coated wafers will then be baked and the ions will worm their way into the silicon. In order to get a nice, even coating, the wafer is spun at a very high rate (2000 rpm) after the liquid is put onto its surface.

Using special wafer tweezers, I place the wafer on the chuck (the spinning thing that the wafer sits on) and try to center it. If the wafer is off center, it will fly off the spinner and break. I press the vacuum button so that the wafer is sucked onto the chuck and give it a little spin. It looks sort of centered, it's difficult to tell because the wafer is not circular (it has a couple flats ground into the edges). Also, I can hardly see because of my old glasses prescription (no contact lenses in the clean room), the safety glasses I have to wear over them, and the fact that we're in the exposure area which is lit with yellow light.

I turn off the vacuum and nudge the wafer with the tweezers, turn the vacuum back on again and evaluate its centeredness. "Is this okay?" I ask one of the others. "I'm a real perfectionist—I could be here all day."

"That's fine."

"Okay." I squeeze the liquid glass from an eyedropper onto the wafer, put the cover over the spinner, and let it spin.

The wafer does not fly off and shatter. The honor of the Tuesday lab group remains unstained by wafer breakage.

Delta time

I was trying to write about the latest incremental and horrifyingly minor breakthrough we've had, but I keep running through signal assignments in my head in an effort to determine whether the design will work under certain circumstances. I think it will, but it all depends on delta time. And I should test it under those circumstances.

I should stop thinking about it.

Delta time is an interesting aspect of hardware definition language. When you change the value of a signal during a process, that value isn't updated until the end of the process. So I've got all these decision statements (if-then-else) and I'm trying to visualize what the values of the signals, changed in an early part of the process, are when the decision statements are being executed. The whole thing is supposed to detect when a signal changes faster than a certain rate, so with everything changing all the time and decisions being made based on how things change, it all gets quite confusing.

Anyhow, I'm confused.

I should stop thinking about it.

Right now.

(But I think I really got it working. This time.)

Reverse polarity

We've done so many about faces that we're back where we started. Finally.

Our design doesn't fit on the development board we are using, even after we break it into two parts and try to put the parts on the two chips available on the board. Then we decide to switch to a different board, not that we had any other options, and made up the necessary file of pinouts for that board. (The synthesis tools use the pinout information to link the actual wires on the board with the signals that we describe in the hardware definition language.) Once that's done, we work on revising the logic to work with the quirks of the new board. Then when Dr. Smith is helping us with some "bad synchronous description" errors, he mentions that he's got a better board and why don't we use that instead?

His board really is better. So it's back to making another pinout file, because the pins are totally different. We find, however, that this board is so much better that its documentation is ten times as long as the documentation for the other boards we tried. Likewise the chip on the board has got documentation that's two hundred times longer than the documentation for the other chips. Because printing out three hundred pages of stuff will annihilate our print allowances for the semester, we have to root around in these massive pdfs to find the information we need, which is oddly sprinkled through these many, many pages instead of collected in a handy table, as it is for the inferior chips.

So call me Grouchy.

We then spend the rest of the day troubleshooting weird errors that turned out to result from how all the components that were active low (need a '0' to turn on) on the other boards are active high (need a '1') on the new board. Except for the ones that weren't. Of course, if we had reviewed the umpteen pages of documentation, we would have found this out beforehand.

Now that that's all resolved (for the moment), we can start trying to figure out why it doesn't work.

Bellwether

The first thing I hear on the radio this morning is the weather report. They're talking snow, like six inches. No way! I check the weather page and they are saying no such thing, just a little sleet maybe.

By the time I go in to class, I've forgotten about it, but my fellow students are buzzing. We sit in our seminar class (where showing up is 99% of everything) and consider the weather.

"It's not going to happen," I say.

"Oh yeah? But Pinocchio washed his car today," Ratso counters.

"You did?" I ask Pinocchio.

"Yeah. It looks really good now."

"How much did it cost?" Cali-boy asks a leading question. "Twenty dollars?"

"No! It was $16.99."

"You paid sixteen dollars for a car wash? You know, the Rainbow Wash is only like twenty cents," Ratso says.

"Yeah, but I didn't want to get out of my car."

"So that's the indicator of whether it's really going to snow? Pinocchio spends a lot of money on a car wash?" I ask.

"Yeah," Ratso says, as if I should have known.

Class begins and we subside. Since we sit in the far back corner of the auditorium, the others play with their phones and laptops during the lecture. Text messages fly. I notice that the young man in front of me has a girly picture on his phone. When I comment on this later, I am told "No, that's not porn, it's wallpaper. Completely different."

Ratso is surfing on his shoe phone (it's not actually a shoe phone, but it's almost as big as one; it's a sort of hand-sized mini-laptop). "Psst," he whispers to me and holds it up to display a satellite image of a massive storm front bearing down on Virginia. "See?"

No quantum leaping

I solved my time stamp problem. It was, as suspected, programmer error. The software that the Hamsters interact with has a structure that is both sequential and layered. I just needed to move the time stamping process to another layer.

Now, on to the next problem! We've been working on a "smart" synchronizer for the Hamsters and, now that we've got our logic designed to work with what the hardware is actually doing, as opposed to what we thought the hardware was doing, our logic will no longer fit on the CPLD we're using to implement it. Unfortunately (or perhaps not), streamlining the logic is probably not an option because our current design requires 142 macrocells (spaces on the chip where the logic is put) more than the CPLD has available and I'm not sure that we can design away 47% of the logic without designing away 100% of the functionality. Fortunately, the CPLD sits on a development board with a second and as yet untapped CPLD. Having the two chips work together will involve a host of juicy clocking problems.

Lucky us.

Time out of mind

Or maybe I'm just going nuts.

Dr. Science and his crew want to compare the Hamsters with the pre-Hamster system. In order to do that, they want to be able to take Hamster files and dump them into the same software they've been using to analyze data collected by the pre-Hamster system. All quite reasonable except that the Hamsters generate data in a different (better) format. Consequently we've been stuck with creating a program that will take Hamster data and convert it to the pre-Hamster format.

Which is easy, theoretically. Except for the slight matter of how no one actually knows what's in the files generated by the old system. Or at least, that's what you'd think given how difficult it's been to get that information out of them. In defense of Dr. Science et al., the old system was built twenty years ago and the people who developed the software are long gone.

Today I finally dug through all the files they've been sending and found some answers. Ratso's mostly got the conversion software working. Now it's a matter of having the Hamster system generate a little extra data for Ratso's software to add in to the file it generates. One of the things we need is the start time and end time of the data collection session. It only takes five minutes to add a feature to the Hamster system so it will write out a file with the requisite time stamps. We hook up the Hamsters, have them collect data for a few minutes, then check the time stamps.

Oddly enough, the end time is earlier than the start time.

I know that time travel is not a Hamster feature. (We won't mention that to Dr. Science, because he'll get nanotubes involved and we'll get the kind of spec creep that haunts my nightmares.)

Hunched behind a monitor, Ratso says, "I think we should just let them worry about it."

"Yeah." I leave the Hamsters to run overnight to see if this happens when the start and end times are hours apart instead of only minutes.

'1' for the road

Remember that '1' we were so frantic to get yesterday?

We can't use it.

The line drivers are not behaving as I had assumed they would. Regardless of whether the Hamsters are putting out a '1' or a '0', the line drivers which receive the signal from the Hamster and send it on to the next level are always at '1'. At first we thought the issue was the crossed wires we found on the PCB (courtesy of the last Hamster team), but upon further review of the line driver documentation (Whoo hoo! More documentation!), I noticed where it said "A and B will be high when the line is inactive." So when the Hamster sends out an unchanging '1', the next stage receives an unchanging '1'. However, when the Hamster sends out an unchanging '0', the next stage receives an unchanging '1'. Since the logic for the next level is looking for the change between '1' and '0' and back again, this is obviously not going to work.

The solution is simple. We have the Hamster send out pulses when it's ready to start collecting data and a '0' (in effect, a '1') when it's ready to stop. We write a pulse detecting process for the next level so it can know the difference.

The two-and-a-half hours we spent yesterday on getting that '1'? Well, the extra familiarity with the Hamster documentation certainly won't hurt…

Make me '1' with everything

Mountain Girl and I are working on the Hamsters. We've put together the hardware, modified the software, synthesized a control circuit onto a CPLD, and now we're trying to figure out why it doesn't work.

We knew it wasn't going to work. We were prepared for that.

The first order of the day is to trace the problems back to the One True Error, the source of the cascading series of problems that leaves our pile of wires and circuitry with the status of junk. We go wrong at first by assuming that when we program the Hamster to write a '1' out to the Port F Pin 5, which we must use because that's how it's wired on the printed circuit board (to do otherwise would involve mutilating the board and soldering wires onto scratched up traces), the Hamster does indeed write a '1' out to that pin. We used the WriteBit() function, after all. It should write out a bit, right?

Once we finally discard that assumption, we put a probe on the pin and find that we get no '1'. We use assembly language and write a '1' to the pin by force. No '1'. We double check our Port F initializations and initialize Every Single control register to make sure that the port is set up to do what we want.

Port F ignores us.

We make pointed comments while casting sidelong looks just over the microcontrollers.

"Gee. I wonder why there are no hammers in the lab."

"Bad Hamster, no kibble."

We read more documentation. At this point we have six browser windows open to the various documentation files for the Hamster microcontroller. Repeatedly we are informed that Port F can be configured for output and how to do it. Repeatedly none of this works. Based on some characteristics of the more special control registers, I become suspicious that this is a problem with the data not getting clocked out to the port ever. I think that the "pclk" that is the default is a peripheral clock that does not actually exist. (The more I think about it, the more certain I become. We should probably have examined the other timing options but we were getting tired. Okay, so I just rechecked the documentation because I live to read documentation and that is not the problem. I think that the reference to the conflict between Ports A and F is perhaps not as complete as it ought to be.)

At last we review what did work. Port F Pin 5 was used to send out a pulse-width modulation signal. We find that if we use the PWM() function, we can set the duty cycle to 100%, making the pulse high all the time and thereby giving us our '1'. When we want a '0' we set the duty cycle to 0%.

This works.

I don't like it.

The joys of oxidation

When you form a layer of oxide on a silicon wafer, the color of the wafer changes according to the thickness of the oxide. This property is useful for eyeballing the thickness of your oxide, and certainly for visually identifying which wafers have been oxidized. It's also been used to create chip art (There's more on—and more—chip art at the Chipworks Silicon Art Gallery and some downloadable chip art wallpaper at Florida State University's Molecular Expressions) and, of course, IC chips.

Today in microfabrication, the professor mentions the difficulty of getting the resist to adhere to the wafer and how sometimes they end up spending hours in the lab trying to get resist to stick on a wafer that's being patterned with an image and text to give to a university donor. Mostly because they use old wafers that have been sitting by the oven for years. "Maybe you've seen them lying around the lab? You'll all get to make one at the end of the class. You can put anything you want on it—"

"Hey!" The class perks up.

"—as long as it's not obscene."

"Aw, man!" The back row is disappointed. I wonder what they wanted to put on their wafers, but I think I'd rather not know.

So, what shall I put on my wafer? I'm thinking of something for Oz, along the lines of "My girlfriend went to engineering school for seven years and all I got was this lousy wafer" or maybe something in Japanese like a big 気 (ki). Oz says that since I'm so miserable in the clean room I ought to keep the wafer as a reward (to remember the experience by?), but I can't think of anything to put on it. Maybe a riff on Rene Magritte's La Trahison des Images: "Ceci n'est pas un wafer." Or maybe Kitty-chan, she's everywhere.

Barriers to entry

Origami Girl bounds into the lab where Mountain Girl and I are working on the Hamsters. Since she's EE and our programs have diverged, we don't have any classes together anymore, so it's Old Home Minute.

"Guys! Would you believe that I got into grad school without totally applying?" she says.

"How's that?" "Where?"

"UVA! I started filling out their online application, but I never finished and then I missed the deadline to apply for financial aid. So I figured that was that, but then I got an email telling me to finish my application. I worked on it a little more, but I was tired and I figured, hey, no money, so why? And then the other night at, like, 1:30 am I checked my email and it said 'Congratulations! You have been accepted…' and I thought, now which of my friends did this to me? But it was real!" Origami Girl demonstrates high frequency oscillation.

"Well, congratulations. Are you getting a fellowship or something?" I ask.

"I don't know. I'm going to the information session and we'll see. I'm looking for a job around here anyway." She shrugs.

No question unanswered

Unasked questions get answered too.

But if I am not present, then I don't have to hear the answer.

In theory.

Okay, not to get all philosophical, but we are taking a closer look at this commercial weather station that Ratso thinks we can back engineer. I thought that wiring up a couple sensors to a microcontroller would be sufficient, but Ratso works at a marine supply store and has spent too much time staring at the stock and getting ideas. Hence the fancy weather station and its soon to be voided warranty. Each of the sensors on this weather station outputs data in different forms. Each sensor has a wire. Getting the data out of the wires and into our microcontroller will not be as simple as hooking the wire up to the microcontroller.

"No, the Hamster wants digital data. It can only read in 1's and 0's. What's coming off the wire is a variable voltage. The Hamster can only interpret that as either a 1 or a 0," I explain to Ratso, who's just brought up the "hook the wire to the Hamster" idea.

"But it's a DC signal," he says.

"Yeah, but that's not digital. We need it in bits. We'll have to use an A to D converter. Once the Hamster reads in the bits, it can interpret them as the actual data. We'll need, like, maybe three bits for that data?" I wonder.

Ratso looks blank. "So we need a three-bit A to D converter? But it's a DC signal."

"Well, yeah, but… I don't know if there is such a thing. Maybe you should ask Dr. Smith?" I know what he's in for, but I say it anyway.

Ratso goes to Dr. Smith's office. Mountain Girl and I work on our part of the project, finishing up the logic for the FPGA part. Then we try to compile and start cleaning up compile time errors.

Time passes.

"I wonder what's taking Ratso so long," MG says.

"I guess he's getting lots of answers. Do you think I should go see? On the other hand, that'll just distract Dr. Smith and it'll take that much longer to get Ratso out of there." Besides, Dr. Smith might well free associate a bit more spec creep for us.

Time passes. We clean out synthesis errors, resolve all the warnings that pop up during the translation process (compiling to hardware has a lot of steps: compilation, translation, synthesis). Continents shift.

I say, "Maybe I should go in there and get Ratso. But—Dr. Smith will come up with more stuff for us to do. God, I'm turning into such a hider, but that's the only way we're going to keep this project under control!"

Time passes. MG and I discuss how the software for other parts of the system need to be modified to work with the hub we're devising. I check my watch. I have class in a while.

Ratso staggers up to the lab and leans on the doorjamb.

"You get an answer?" MG giggles.

"I got the life story. He says we need a twelve bit A to D converter so we get enough resolution. I'm supposed to go ahead and order samples." Ratso lurches over to his computer and goes to the website of a chip manufacturer. He pulls of a screen filled with a full listing of A to D products. "Where do I even begin? What are all these?"

"Why don't you go ask—Pinocchio? He's using a twelve bit one in his project," I say.

Ratso mutters, "We've got sixteen bit ones upstairs. Why don't we just use those? But—oh, no—that'd be overkill, he says."

Know the difference

Oz says, "Yeah, I tell them at work how you rip on the IT people."

Indignant, I say, "I do not. I rip on the computer science people. There are two different programs. The IT people learn how to do things and the computer science people are too slack to study either IT or engineering."

"Well, somebody has to know how things work," he says and starts talking about read heads and software design.

Okay, so computer science people learn some of the stuff that computer engineers do. "But computer engineers are cuter. And they all have better skin."

"And they stand up straighter?"

I nod. "They do. And, based on an admittedly very small sample, I have to say that computer science students read Robert Jordan, while computer engineering students read Umberto Eco." Of course, in all fairness, I should say that if you remove me from that sample, you'd have to say that computer engineering students don't read at all.

Suits me

Or not.

Today is the career fair at my school. I've been getting prepared for ages, it seems. I get the suit, the shoes, decide on accessories, acquire appropriate foundation garments, have a tailor alter the suit slightly so it fits better, and on and on and on. Girl clothes have way too many rules. This morning I get up bright and early and get around to printing up some resumes, distribution of said resumes being the whole point of the suit and shoes and on and on and on. Adjust a comma here, update a little there, and ages later I have a folder of resumes. Then I dress and I'm ready to go on time, except I can't find a lipstick. I didn't bother to buy a new lipstick because I was pretty sure I had some old, petrified ones in the linen cabinet where I keep my medicine cabinet overflow. (Yeah, nasty old lipstick, but if you put chapstick on first, the lipstick goes on okay.) But I couldn't find one. "Maybe it's in one of those purses?" I run around the house looking into the little old purses I only use on the one or two times a year that I have to wear high heels and no lipstick there either. Back to the linen cabinet where I finally find a lipstick jammed beneath a q-tip box and unidentified toiletries of archeological significance.

I get to school without further mishap and run into Mountain Girl, wearing her black interview suit, outside the engineering building.

"Hey! We match," she calls.

More or less. Her shirt is cream colored and mine is electric, LED green (I'm trying to send subliminal messages to the recruiters), but otherwise, yes, we match. We walk over to the Commons building where the career fair is being held and up to the check-in desk, bypassing the employer check-in area, much to the surprise of the people working that desk.

"No, we are students," we explain. We only look like we have jobs.

"Way to go, ladies!" the employer check-in people say.

After we check in, we run into Cruise Ship Guy (who is wearing a name tag, so now I finally know his name!). He is all suited up and when MG compliments him even though he doesn't match us, he says how he got the suit at Goodwill for US$20 and tailored it himself. (I don't know why, he's got suits already, but anyway…)

"You know how to do so many things," MG admires.

"Well, I am from Jamaica. In my country we have to be able to do everything," he says.

Once they let us into the ballroom, we schmooze around with the three or four employers who are looking for engineers. Actually, they are looking for interns more than they are for full time employees, which is kind of scary for MG and me, but less so for CSG who still needs to get an internship in order to graduate. Also unnerving is that we have to explain what a computer engineering major is to recruiters who were ostensibly looking for computer engineers. Still, we get through it and even pick up a few leads.

Can employment be far behind?

Learning the bugs

We have this homework assignment in Digital Design, another multi-hour engineering problem: design an 8-bit ripple-carry adder. The problem with the problem, as it were, is not with the design of the 8-bit adder. We've done little adders in vhdl before and I just used one of those, modified slightly to meet the specification we were given, because why write code when you can copy/paste? I got that done on Sunday. The problem is that we're using two different sets of tools (software packages) to translate the adder code into actual hardware, analyzing the gate delays, and then abusing our little adder with operations that will strain the timing constraints of the hardware. In English: We make it do hard math that takes a long time to see how long it really takes. Anyway, that isn't even the problem. The problem is that the tools are buggy! Yes, buggy! Buggy in the really charming "that only works if you compile at the command line because if you compile in the GUI you get an error" kind of way. Buggy in the "the signal names get changed in the timing constraints file so you have to go in and edit them by hand to match the post-synthesis structure file" way. So, between the bugs and my lack of familiarity with the software, I spent the day (yes, the whole day) synthesizing and simulating the adder over and over and asking the professor for help interpreting the mysterious error messages. I've barely gotten to the adder-abuse part.

The scary thing is that I'm the only one in the class who's started. It's due Thursday.

DIY Engineering

Is there any other kind?

Mountain Girl and I are lurching on ahead with our part of the group project. We've figured out how to wire everything up and (supposedly) Dr. Science is acquiring the line drivers we need. If we don't hear anything by the end of the week, we're having Dr. Flight order them for us. Line drivers are the chips we use to convert signals between the RJ45 signals (Ethernet) and the low voltage pulses that can be handled by the CPLD, which we're using as a controller. Even without the line drivers, we can get started with the controller logic.

Our next step is to create the file that informs the hardware definition language of the CPLD pinouts (the pins of the CPLD chip are wired to various I/O devices like LEDs and switches and to the open pins through which the CPLD will send signals to the Hamsters). In our previous classes, this file was always provided to us but now we're sort of on our own. Because the CPLD is different and therefore has different pinouts from the devices we used before, we can't simply copy over the file we used before. Not without changing all the pin numbers anyway.

First we try to scavenge a UCF file off the Internet. We aren't the first people to do this and perhaps our predecessors have posted a file online. No joy. Oh well. Doing things yourself is good for you.

We take the schematics for the CPLD prototyping board and the schematics for the I/O board. These two boards are connected with two 40 pin sockets. Matching up the pin for LED 1 with the corresponding pin on the CPLD would be a simple matter if Pin 1 on the header of the CPLD board matched Pin 1 on the socket of the I/O board. Naturally, the pins don't match. Pin 1 matches Pin 39, Pin 2 matches Pin 40, Pin 3 matches Pin 37, and so on for forty pins times two. So say you're trying to hook the CPLD to LED 1. On the schematic of the I/O board, you find the I/O board pin that's connected to LED 1 and match it with the corresponding pin on the CPLD board, then you look at the pinout chart for the CPLD (which has 144 pins so big chart), match the connector pin to the CPLD pin, and write down the CPLD pin number for LED 1. Phew. We have plenty of devices to hook up: eight LEDs, eight switches, five buttons, and a seven segment display which is run with twelve wires. With two pairs of eyes and two heads, this is not too bad. I'm glad I didn't have to do this on my own, because I'd have gotten everything upside down and backwards before I got it right.

After we do all that, we use one of our old UCF files and just change the pin numbers. Then we surf around and look at pictures of groundhogs. "Ooh! This one's cute!" "That one looks like a prairie dog." "Eew. That one has yucky yellow teeth!" "Do you think they should do dental hygiene before they photo-op him?"

I notice that the grad student in the corner keeps shooting us the "My God! Will you people shut up? I can't concentrate!" look. He's going to have a really long semester.

Clean room

Lab in the clean room is not only dangerous, but also uncomfortable and dull. We have a Class 1000 clean room (no more than 1000 particles per cubic foot of air) and our protocol isn't as strict as at a commercial plant, where they would have a Class 10 or Class 1 clean room. I'm amazed that people at the big plants can stand it for any length of time. Then again, if they want out, all they have to do is break protocol and they're fired on the spot.

Protocol is the set of procedures one must follow in order to keep particles out of the clean room: bunny suits, hair nets, hoods, face shields, air showers, sticky mats at the doors to pull particles off the soles of your shoes. You can't take a pencil into the clean room, because a pencil works by rubbing particles onto paper. You have to use special paper. You have to use approved pens. If there is too much sodium in the ink, the particles released when you pull the cap off the pen will put sodium into the wafers, which will then have their electrical properties compromised by having too many ions.

Our protocol is sticky mats, booties, hair nets, safety glasses, latex gloves, and jump suits. Despite reality, it is assumed that all persons using the clean room are giants, so I get stuck with a huge jump suit, booties that flap around the soles of my shoes, safety glasses that rest painfully halfway down my nose (I have to use the big safety glasses to fit on over regular glasses since we aren't allowed to wear contact lenses), and big wrinkly gloves with squeaky air bubbles. I wonder if the petite researchers have their own personal gear that fits.

Many of the guys in my lab section (I'm the only one without the Y chromosome) are pretty big, however, and so I find myself spending most of the lab period looking at their backs as we gather around the rinse bench to wash our wafers. The washing process consists of dipping a basket of wafers in various toxic baths and standing around for several minutes while they soak. There's really only room for two people to work at the bench and I don't mind letting the foolhardy youths pour and mix the toxic chemicals because I've had more than enough physical trauma in the past six months, thankyouverymuch. The two boys who mess with the HF, hydrogen peroxide, and so on have to wear, over their protocol gear, face shields, rubber aprons, and big pink rubber gloves.

The rinse bench is back in the section of the clean room with yellow lights. This is where the resist is put on the wafers, and the wafers are exposed and developed (sort of like a photographic process, but not). The resist is light sensitive. You put resist on the wafer, expose the wafer to a certain pattern, the resist is cured in that pattern, you rinse off the uncured resist, do things to the wafer, then take off the rest of the resist so that the pattern of the things you did remains on the wafer. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually you get microchips.

Another particle attenuation method is air circulation. The air turns over in the clean room six times per minute and is filtered. Vertical laminar flow, in which air comes straight down through the ceiling and is vented out around the base of the walls, pulls particles down and out of the room. The ceiling is translucent and the fluorescent light is diffused so you don't get much in the way of shadows. Except in the yellow light area, the light is really bright and white. The fans make a lot of noise too. Between the weird light, the white noise, and the protocol gear, it's kind of a sensory deprivation experience.

Eventually our wafers are clean and dry. They are transferred back to their cassette for safekeeping till next week.

Ahead of the game

Ratso is working on the digital design homework. I worked on it till late last night and finished it up this morning. Once I stopped second guessing myself, I got through it okay. Like, ten times, even. Nothing reinforces a concept like intense repetition interleaved with errors both stupid and confounding.

"I won't tell you how many hours it took me," I say. "Or maybe I should. It'll probably make you feel good."

"Uh. I doubt it. I spent quite a few hours on it and one of those was with a professor," Ratso says.

Well, that makes me feel better.

"Review"

I'm taking a brief break from my homework (check out the time stamp on this post) to whine a little bit, because this is a genuine, hours-long, engineering homework. It shouldn't be as bad as it is, because this is ostensibly a review problem set to see what we've retained from the introductory digital design class we took two years ago. I'm glad I kept the textbook, I'm finding it useful to read the sections of the book that we didn't cover in that class. Not exactly a normal component of the review process, but one does what one must. This type of homework is a direct result of professors not talking to each other.

You call that a homework?

A homework problem that takes less than two minutes hardly counts. In engineering classes, I've routinely had homework problems take hours. Not the whole assignment. One problem of eight or more. While I've on occasion had the same experience with maths and computer science homeworks, those have been less usual, if not the exception.

The first assignment for my computer science class in discrete structures was fifteen of these two-minute gems, with only one to be turned in. The other fourteen are for practice. Since all fourteen of the practice problems together added up to less than half the time necessary for, say, a filter design problem and also because I'm too diligent for my own good, I went ahead and did them all. I'm such a good student, but not so much that I don't hope this assignment sets the tone for the rest of the semester.

And, of course, this just confirms my suspicion that computer science majors are a bunch of pikers.

Let's go shopping!

The Internet has made life much easier for engineers, fledgling and otherwise. We are looking for the various bits and pieces we need to add on to the Hamsters. In the olden days, we'd be pawing through smudgy catalogs (which we could do now; we have plenty lying around the lab), squinting at fine print and blurry pictures of chips, or flipping through industry magazines to look at ads. Thanks to the Internet, we can do that online! In addition to the visual zoom, advantages are that we can download a complete spec sheet for anything we're interested in and even order free samples.

I am loving the free sample thing. Yeah, we only get two chips, or whatever, but we'll be able to plug them in and test them out before we buy the eight that we need. Besides, as we are still very much in the fledgling stage of our lives as engineers, we find the language on the spec sheets to be obscure and sometimes the only way for us to get a clue is to plug-n-chug.

Some things we have to buy up front. In the spirit of plug-n-chug, we're ordering six different kinds of temperature sensors because we're not sure which will work with the Hamsters and the total is only going to be ten dollars, well within the departmental budget.

We can also use information resources to clear up professor-induced confusion. For example, I am told to get an amplifier with a certain gain. "Look for an instrumentation amplifier," Dr. Smith says. I find one that looks good, order samples, and pass the spec sheet on to Dr. Smith, who points out a few days later that this amplifier is for DC signals, not AC.

"So I think you need an instrumentation amplifier," he says.

"But, that was—" I return to the altar of Google, make the appropriate sacrifices, and find a definition for "instrumentation amplifier" (an amplifier optimized for use with DC signals). I go on to find a nifty "isolation amplifier" which works for AC signals. I'm not sure it's what we need, but, whoo, free samples!

Word problems

Our first assignment in Microfabrication involved some basic arithmetic. Given the wafer diameter and chip size, calculate the number of chips you can put on a wafer. Then calculate cost per chip given a certain yield, and so on. Not hard, except that our professor, somewhat distracted by being locked in an interdepartmental fight to the death over funding for a scanning electron microscope, has neither covered the material in any detail, nor managed to get the textbooks into the bookstore.

I know how to hunt up information online, though. I find that Micron, in a shocking display of silliness, has similar exercises posted in their K12 education pages, except that the formulas they offer will only work on a square wafer. And the wafers, they are not square.

On the other hand, the instructor of a similar class at the University of Massachusetts (which probably already has a couple electron microscopes) has a more grown up formula and the time to post it.

Isn't it just totally wrong for a microchip company to post incorrect information about microchips? Or is Micron populated with evil geniuses who are manufacturing single-crystal silicon ingots with square cross sections?

A shock to the system

As of today I have outstanding homework assignments in all my classes: Microfabrication, Discrete Structures, and Advanced Digital Systems. Together with the Senior Design Seminar, these add up to a full course load. Oh, and there's that huge senior project (more fun with Hamsters) to do as well. Also, we are the class of record as my university goes for ABET accreditation for the computer engineering program (Now in its fourth exciting year!) so we have to prepare a portfolio of various lab reports, papers, and projects we've done over the years. And they want this portfolio in the form of an interactive website so it will look nice for the accreditation board. I should get cracking on that right away instead of leaving it till May. I'll get to it as soon as I finish up the little translation job that came in today.

If all that wasn't enough, we had the mandatory safety lecture in preparation for entering the clean room and making some chips. We will be using chemicals that can sink imperceptibly through your skin and dissolve your bones, chemicals that can reduce your lungs to jelly, and nail polish remover, which is pretty benign by comparison. And I thought the warning signs all over the ChemE floor were scary. Suddenly this doesn't seem like such a fun class. The bunny suits don't even have ears.

Risk assessment

We are working on our preliminary design proposal for our senior project. In one section we have to make an assessment of our major sources of risk: what can go wrong and what we can do about it. We decide that our main source of risk, apart from human error (because we know ourselves), is the whole entire research facility that is running the Hamster project.

Hey, we're free labor. It's not like they can fire us for bringing up the blatantly obvious.

Case in point: The weather station we're supposed to be adding to the Hamsters

The portions of our design proposal relating to the weather station consist entirely of question marks. We got a glimpse of the weather station a couple weeks ago, but we don't have it in hand, nor do we have any technical information. We've been asking about it for some time.

Today we ask Dr. Smith about it again when he drops into the lab to discuss one of the New! Surprising! additions to the project. As he'd been expecting to receive the technical specs from Dr. Science this morning, he goes back to his office to check his email.

Five minutes later he returns, looking stunned and carrying a sheet of paper. "This is all he sent. Maybe you'd better email him with…specific questions."

I take the sheet of paper and see that it's basically a research summary, a few paragraphs describing the weather station, with all the technical content of a press release. "I don't think we know enough about it to ask specific questions." I think up some later and email Dr. Science, but I doubt I'll have any more luck than Dr. Smith did.

How much do you want to bet we never get it? Or that they haven't even put it together? What they showed us was a circuit board and a few loose sensors. I'd say not having the central component of the project is our greatest source of risk, except that it seems to have gone beyond risk and into certainty.

Milestone #1

Dr. Flight's first order was for us to get a few of the Hamsters up and running again so that we'd have a development system to work with. Hence the ripping of components from an old board and putting them on a new board. Today we test out the new Hamster board.

It flatlines. This is bad.

There is much messing with oscilloscopes and multimeters to trace the captured signal through the board and find out where it stopped. Attendant crises thereof are dealt with by setting the gain on the board to something other than zero (else you get a flatline), setting the scope to read a 10X probe as a 10X probe instead of a 1X probe (else you get one tenth the amplitude—nearly a flatline), and questioning Ratso about how he removed the very expensive amplifier chip from the old board ("We stuck it in that oven thing and got it really hot so the solder melted and it just fell out of the board. Along with some other stuff."). But once we get the probe situation resolved, we find that the amplifier is working correctly. We check the next chip on down the line and see—

The A/D converter chip is stuck in backwards. So no data, hence the flatline. Luckily for us, the A/D converter is in a socket, so it's simply a matter of pulling it out and popping it back in.

Now we have three working boards, four if you count the one that's missing a power converter (we can work around that by applying the correct voltage at the contact where the power converter's output would be).

I'm glad I have pie

I shrug off the sense o' doom and make it through the first day of the semester. I get an announcement about the career fair in early February, so now I know I have just three weekends to acquire a business suit.

I should call Lisa. Lisa will know what to buy and I have enough credit to buy what she tells me to. Because a good suit is an investment and damn the finance charges!

Dr. Flight, who's managing the senior projects, brings up the very Hamster issue about which I was most concerned: the lack of a clear spec from Dr. Science. (Or even an unchanging spec. I'd settle for that. Or, even more in-my-dreams, a needs analysis interview with the people who will be using the Hamsters.) We proceed to figuratively nail Dr. Smith—our Dr. Science liaison—to the wall and insist upon getting a set of part numbers, if not actual parts, within the next few days.

In the meantime, we're ripping expensive components off old Hamster boards to populate the new Hamster boards. Ratso is most enthusiastic about this and I notice that one of the DC-DC power converters is decorated with bits of melted circuit board. Tomorrow I will be checking to make sure that the components survived the ripping off process.

The beginning of the end

Today is the last day of winter break. Tomorrow is the first day of my last semester. I keep thinking that this semester will be less bad, but I have a feeling that's wishful thinking. I'm not taking too many hours, but we have to make some major strides with the Hamster project and those Hamsters make you fight for every incremental improvement.

In any case, last day of freedom. So I work on applications for jobs for which I'm not quite qualified, but which I'd love to do. I write a cover letter. I gnash my teeth and gripe about the PeopleSoft interface and wonder if I really want to work for an organization that uses it. But what are my options there? I find it nearly every place I look.

I've got another cover letter to write. I've got my graduation application all filled out and ready to submit to my advisor tomorrow.

Only seventeen more weeks, one of which is Spring Break.

I have this feeling of impending doom even as I glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel. It's very odd.

End of the tunnel

Finally, today I resolve the last, lingering questions about transfer credits and basic requirements. I get the word that I will definitely (Hah!) graduate this spring and I won't have to take any more classes than what I've already registered for. That is quite the relief. I had noticed that transfer students seem to have more than one "last semester" and I didn't want that to happen to me—even if I did have to take extra credit hours and have a nervous breakdown this semester.

I also seem to have recovered from the last semester. My energy's back, I'm feeling creative and stories are bubbling up out of my subconscious. This means that it's time to start contorting my brain into the unnatural configurations necessary for designing circuits and logic. Great timing, eh?

Why I like finals

Mostly because they are, as advertised, final.

Finals is the best time of the semester. It's the only time when you can finish an assignment and not turn around to find another ten hanging over you. Finals are relaxing. Doom has pretty much fallen on you, if it's going to, so all you can do is study to the extent you're able (or not) and stay calm and take your exams.

That is the approach I used to study for Dr. Smith's exam. On his tests this semester, he has been coming up with all kinds of stuff that elicits from us the reaction: "Where does this shit come from?" Bearing that in mind, I focused on reviewing my notes (For all the good it'll do…Damn, we sure covered a lot of material this semester!) and not panicking. Besides, the exam is open notes. That hasn't helped in the past, but hope springs eternal.

When I go in to take the exam today, I find Mountain Girl flipping out.

Humility Boy tries to comfort her. "You know all this stuff."

"No, I don't!" she wails.

"You knew it last night," he protests, with futility.

"How did you study for this?" she asks me.

"I just reviewed my notes and practiced not panicking."

"That's it! I didn't practice not panicking!" She grabs Humility Boy's arms and shakes him. The chicken sandwich he is (was) holding falls apart all over the floor. He looks with dismay upon the scattered remnants of his lunch and emits a little glottal-stoppy wail of his own.

"Dude, ten second rule!" some of the other guys call, but Humility Boy has to endure MG's apology first. This involves his head being clutched to her chest. He doesn't seem to mind all that much and is rather cheerful when he reassembles his sandwich after wiping off the individual components on a napkin.

Heard in the Sun lab

None of us is thinking too clearly. Today was the last day of classes and the final projects are coming due hour by hour.

A voice rises from one corner of the lab. "Oh no! Oh my God! Oh no! I saved it. I didn't think what I was doing. I cut out all that stuff by accident, but then I saved it! We can't just close it out and reopen it to get it back! Oh no! That whole design! The layout! The entire wafer! Everything!"

And another from across the room, from someone who's done that before. "It's still there. Paste everything into the clipboard. Then open out a new wafer and paste all your stuff onto it. You can get it back."

Study days

I have two finals on Monday. Good news: those are the only two finals I have. Bad news: I still have a paper and a technical report to write. Good news: I drafted the technical report, on my microprocessor design, tonight. Bad news: The person testing the microprocessors said he found that mine loaded a wrong number into a wrong register. Good news: I can probably fix that pretty easily, or it might be a problem with his test bench so I can blame him. Bad—oh heck! Anyway, I also recalled that I left out a feature (stalling the pipeline when the instruction following a load from memory needs the loaded value), but I obsessed over it for a while and figured out how to implement it with not too many lines of code. I'm going into the lab early tomorrow to test it. I've been spending this evening studying ineffectively for my software engineering final. Now I'm going to study ineffectively for my computer architecture final, wash the dishes, do my physical therapy, and go to bed. At a reasonable hour. So I can get up early and hit the Sun lab.

Managerial skillz

I'm chatting with Dr. Smith about the Hamsters. They're behaving a little bit oddly and I'm fishing for any insight into why that could be.

Because I hadn't observed this particular behavior (very slight and inconsistent phase shift among the different channels) before we started testing some of the Hamsters with extra long cables, I have to ask, "Do you think it's because some of them have the 300 foot cables? If you get a nanosecond of delay in the signal for every foot of cable, that's still only 0.3 microseconds. Is that difference in the interrupt arrival time enough to even appear in the output?"

After a few minutes of this, I'm noticing that the answers to my questions sound an awful lot like my questions and am not distressed when the subject changes to other plans for the Hamsters. Dr. Smith mentions that he'd like us to make a schematic of the Hamster Hub and I am able to tell him that we've already done it. (Heh. We're ahead of the game—for a few seconds.) Dr. Smith says he'd like us to design a printed circuit board version of the Hub, the current incarnation of which consists of wires and glue.

Also, some additional Hamsters are being assembled and soon we'll be setting up a second system down in Dr. Science's lab. We're also supposed to be adding a weather station to our Hamster setup next semester. Ratso's even asked about it (he wants to write the code). We haven't even seen a spec sheet, so we don't really know what we're in for.

I bring it up. "Has Dr. Science got that weather station yet? I'd kind of like to get them started with it while they're still really stoked about winning that award."

Dr. Smith laughs. "Oh, you're a good manager. I'll go call Dr. Science and see."

"Great. Do you think we can get the weather station to coincide with the arrival of the checks?"

And thus it becomes apparent how really manipulative I can be.

Lab Life

My cats don't even hang out with me anymore. Not that I've been home all that much. Ever since Oz spread a fleece pullover on the couch a few weeks ago, their furry little butts have been glued to it, except during food-related activities (begging and eating and litter-boxing).

I've basically spent all my waking hours since I got back from Tech in the Sun lab, with brief excursions for meals and classes. I'm glad I've finally got some decent pain medication, or else my joints would be screaming (really, emitting squeaky sounds that keep me from sleeping (I'm only exaggerating a little)).

By the end of the day yesterday, I had my pipelined microprocessor design working really well: it executed instructions in a four-stage pipeline in two-and-a-half clock cycles instead of four. Unfortunately, that wasn't "right" so today I consulted with Dr. Smith and spent hours making and testing the modifications that would make it take four clock cycles. So it would be "right." It's right now. I think the problem with my extra-compact pipeline is that it couldn't be synthesized into a real circuit that would actually work, even though it simulated like a dream.

It hit me when I was in the shower this evening. I spent all day sitting in front of a computer, on which I was designing an infinitely less complex computer, and when I got home, I would spend the remainder of the evening noodling around with another computer, linked to millions of other computers.

Putting one's education to use

Ratso had a plan for this road trip. A plan involving Halo 2. Originally he was going to find a way to run the X-Box off a car cigarette lighter so he could play on the way out to Blacksburg, but he slept instead.

When we got back to the hotel after the poster session Friday night, he began to set things up. He picked up an RF cable from Radio Shack so he could hook the X-Box to the television, then networked the X-Box and his laptop and used the hotel's high speed wireless internet connection to play online.

I hung out with them for a while. At one point, Ratso was playing Halo 2 and talking on his headset to other players, Cali-boy was playing Halo 2 and talking on the phone with his fiancéand Mountain Girl was playing games on Yahoo Games and talking on the phone with her mom, explaining to her mom how to log in to some online service.

Back when I was in college, we actually had to talk with each other when we were hanging out together. Times change.

While I was there (before I went to bed early), one of the games involved some French guys. When they shot Ratso, he could hear them insulting him in French.

I told him to call them a bunch of Canadians. "Or Belgians! Yeah, that's even better."

They stayed up till 1:00 am playing Halo 2. They even got MG involved. She told me the next morning, "Oh yeah. I was shooting things and talking smack on Ratso's headset. Some guy thought I was six! Another guy said, 'Hey, dude!' and I said, 'I'm not a dude, I'm a chick!' And then I stole one of those jeep things and drove around honking the horn—and Ratso and Cali-boy didn't know you could do that—till someone shot me and stole it."

And the winner is…

The Hamster project! Won! An actual award!

Our poster session went pretty well, considering that the Hamster project is about sound you can't hear and we were at a meeting of acousticians. I had to answer a lot of questions about the acoustic end of the project, in which I am not as well versed as I am in the computer end. Even so, I impressed someone. We received an award for environmental acoustics from a person whose own research is a perfect match for the Hamsters. (I wonder if Dr. Science knew about this particular award and this researcher when he suggested we attend this meeting.)

We also got to tour some acoustics labs at Virginia Tech, where any one of their engineering buildings is double the size of my university's entire engineering school, and see some research projects and facilities, like a flight simulator (with which they're working on noise abatement for pilots), a cross section of a Saturn rocket (with which they're working on noise abatement for payloads) and an anechoic chamber. They fed us really well too.

This was a great road trip. I'm totally worn out from it and from another nine hour day in the Sun lab. I'll write more later.

Exchange of hostages

The Hamster poster is made. The exchange of hostages took place at an unidentified rest area on I-64 between Richmond and Hampton. Cali-boy and Dr. Science had to coordinate the operation around some visiting researchers from Georgia Tech on Dr. Science's end and Cali-boy's clock-in time at his job. This time tomorrow we'll all be in Blacksburg, the only non-Tech students at this event, to plug the project. Some of the other activities planned for this meeting sound neat too: an Appalachian band and tours of acoustics labs.

So that's one load off my mind. The mind is immediately reloaded upon learning that this microprocessor project is due Tuesday.

I spend nine hours in the Sun lab today. I don't even go home for lunch. I have a minor, hypoglycemic breakdown during which I manage to mess up my code and not see how to fix it and panic, but some apple juice takes care of that.

When I call Oz from the lab this morning, he says, "The Sun lab. You know, when you say that, I always think of you in a sundress, drinking lemonade…"

"Not a margarita?"

"No, lemonade."

I wish the reality matched the fantasy.

By 6:30 pm, I've got it mostly working. I've got a couple more instructions to test (and a fiddly thing to fix which I figure out on the way home) and then I have to start on data memory manipulations, which I'm saving for last. The light isn't exactly at the end of the tunnel just yet, but I see less darkness ahead.

Ultimatum

We were supposed