February 2010 Meeting Notes
Compiled by Dave Jaffe
Contributions from Kevin Appert and others
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09:50 |
Coffee and a Chat |
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10:00 |
Revisiting Mandelbrot - CH Ting
"I started
doing Mandelbrot plots 20 years ago. At that time,
the computer took a long time, about 30 seconds, to render an image. It was
nice, but not very interesting. Now computers are fast enough to do one plot a
second. This now becomes more interesting, because I can interact with the
plots. I like to use a mouse to navigate the plots, but I need help in adding a
mouse interface to F#. I have put all the computation into FPU, and am quite
proud of it. However, Windows steals the FPU from me and I am not sure that I
have the FPU all to myself. Anyway, I will demonstrate almost interactive
Mandelbrot plots."
- F#214 - 365 Kb zip file
- Mandelbrot - 81.2 Kb zip
file
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11:48 |
Lunch
We will walk to
The Treehouse by
Tresidder Union. Here is the
menu.
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13:00 |
Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, and Random
Access
Topics include: A Big Laser (Airborne Laser, ABL), Embedded
Systems Conference, announcement day choice, and whatever else may come up.
- Airborne Laser
- Overview:
Future Weapons Airborne
Laser
- MARTI: Airborne Laser test against
target missile
- MARTI: ABL - Test flight + infrared
lasing
- Engagement:
Airborne Laser - Historic
First Ballistic Missile Intercept
- Engagement:
MDA
Analyzing ABL Test Beam Misalignment
- Engagement:
How Laser Weapons
Work
- COIL:
High Energy
Laser Directed Energy Weapons
- COIL:
Chemical
oxygen iodine laser
- Colored
Script - John Slater
- Making color work in a
language
- The
conditional operator
- Hexakopter
- Hexakopter:
remote-control helicopter puts on amazing aerial display video
- HexaKopter
Micro Copter video
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13:30 |
3D Printers & Makerbot - Eric Smith
3D
printers, like the Makerbot, are the latest trend in technology. Stepper motors
hum, plastic squirts, and before you know it a gimcrack or thingamabob emerges.
Freshman-year engineering students are fabricating wind-turbine blades with
them. Makerbots can make its own replacement parts. We will hear all about it
from Eric, who has assembled one.
- Makerbot
- Makerbot
video
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13:50 |
Break |
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14:00 |
Forth Coding Best Practices - Samuel A. Falvo
II
Sam will share his learning experiences with Forth coding
best-practices for his High-level Data Link Control (HDLC)
network stack supporting his optical communications experiments.
- "The HDLC stack I'm writing is far from complete, and has not
yet been tested over wire links. But, the current set of unit tests suggests
that it can now handle SABM, UA, and DM messages -- meaning that I can now
initiate a connection request and handle success and failure,
respectively."
- Project DOT (Digital Optical
Transceiver) Slides - 262 Kb pdf file
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16:00 |
Adjourn |
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Other items:
- Forth
- Software
- Hardware
- Books
- Other
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