Jupiter at oppositon

Doesn't look like much - until you realise the spots are moons! From left to right we have Ganymede, Io (hidden in Jupiter's glare), Jupiter, Jupiter again reflected off the camera lens, Europa and finally Callisto

So with Jupiter at its shiniest this evening, and the sky at its clearest I dragged my flatmates out to have a quick look through the telescope. One of them had his phone with him and managed to get this picture through the eyepiece! It is no Hubble image - but it does show the moons (three of them anyway).

Visually, the view was rather good, the banding was obvious, either the Southern or Northern Equatorial band (depending on how the image was being flipped in the telescope) was particularly prominent. The gradual upgrades to the 'scope are becoming obvious, the view is now far steadier than before which finally means that the view will stay still long enough to allow me to focus properly and to take advantage of any short periods of good seeing.

Rubik's Cube Solver - Complete!

The group project is complete! With all 67 pages of report submitted and flashy hardware demonstrated nothing else is left to be done. 

So first up, some obligatory photos:

The Solver, in all its death-star-ness

The drama shot of the cube, the centre cube frame is used for holding colour calibration strips for the cameras and is held in place entirely using fishing wire

A resurrected version of our interim submission. We used it for demos during the presentation: wiring the servo into a lab signal generator which allowed us to demonstrate the cube actuation in a controlled (and not covered-in-wires)manner.

And an obligatory solving video:

Solving video!

In the end our gamble with the servos paid itself back, giving us a very high reliability, but rather long solve time. This contrasted well with other groups who had really quick solve times, but ended up with more frequent cube jammings.

My own major contribution to the final product was the design of a computer to cube communication system. One of the requirements put on us (to make things harder) was that we had to route all control signals through an audio cable which could not have any programmable devices after it to control motors. The design and implementation of this system has been one of the most enjoyable things I have done at uni so far - not least because I have reached a level of experience that means I can design basic circuits that work! Inputs to the audio cable were generated using a standard PC soundcard, which let me play with Python at one end, while demodulation was done with some pretty neat circuits at the other.

Signal flow diagram showing the modulation and demodulation of the information signal

 In order to increase the information carrying capacity of the communication system I decided to multiplex multiple signals on the audio cable in the frequency domain, which required a whole bunch of band-pass filters to de-multiplex again. To adequately understand how to send signals to the filters so that they would work properly (by sending them signals in their pass bands) I needed to do a frequency response test on them. To increase awesomeness, and make use of our shiny new lab equipment, I was able to do this entirely automatically, commanding and drawing data from an Oscilloscope and signal generator using MATLAB and an Ethernet cable!

Automatically produced graph of all the filters' frequency responses!

Finally (the funny bit at the end...) I got carried away with Inkscape during the closing stages of the project as we were preparing for presentations which meant that our group ended up with a 'logo'. Needless to say my courage was not up to putting it in the final report!

We were Group A. Yes, the image did start life as the Manhattan project seal.

Rubik's Cube Solver almost there

No pictures, no videos :( - just a hope for some in the near future!

The solver worked really well, and looked insanely cool. With the report due in soon the group has now turned its efforts to Arch Enemy no. 38: Documentation.

Like fools we decided now would be a brilliant time to trial-by-fire learn our way around LaTeX. A couple of thousand lines of code later, and 65 pages, and I think it worked.