Roombas at UVIC 2008 Wrap-up
Last semester at UVIC I was privileged to work as the teaching assistant for the class CSC 460: Design and Analysis of Real-time Systems. This year the professor bought 6 refurbished Roomba's to be used by the students. These Roomba's were programmed with the serial control interface (pdf). This inteface allows API commands to be [...]
The LED Wheel
Last summer I created a project for the University of Victoria that I unimaginatively named the LED Wheel. The LED Wheel is an embedded systems project designed to spin a single row of blinking LEDs and achieve persistence of vision. Here is a picture of the LED Wheel displaying the pattern "UVIC OPEN HOUSE". More [...]
Burned by Embedded Systems: Volatile
The following is a excerpt from this report on the construction of a real time operating system. Volatile During development of the RTOS we ran into a nasty bug. When we chose an optimization option in the gcc compiler such as -O2, our OS behaved differently than when compiled without optimization. Upon closer inspection we [...]