I wrote up some personal thoughts about writing great demo apps on Big Nerd Ranch’s blog.
Tag: coding
Testing in Android @Big Nerd Ranch
I wrote up some notes about using Android Studio together with Gradle and Robolectric over on Big Nerd Ranch’s blog
Past Work: Electro-mechanical Engineer
I’d posted before about working as an electro-mechanical engineer. Eventually, I left that position to attend grad school. I never wrote about finishing up my work, and left much unmentioned in my prior post. I hope wrap up my involvement at ____ by talking about and showing off some of the projects I was responsible for.
Past Work: Large-Scale Mirror Actuation
When I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech, I worked on a research project for a year. I worked part of the time while still in school and continued after I graduated. I didn’t really have a senior design project and most undergrads didn’t do actual “research”. So, I felt pretty lucky to be involved in a real research project, especially given the level of my involvement. I worked with Dr. Harvey Lipkin and his grad student Russell Marzette Jr. Russell and Dr. Lipkin had developed a new way to actuate (bend and position) really large telescope mirrors and it was my job to develop software to model and test this technique. I wrote some MATLAB and ANSYS code to automate all of my tests. What was really cool (and unknown to me prior) was that I could use ANSYS from the command line and write scripts which match a normal GUI work flow in the 3D environment. I could create structures, apply loads, mesh structures, and run simulations all from scripts. This allowed me to create a MATLAB GUI to set parameters (or sets of parameters), create and execute custom ANSYS scripts, and format ANSYS-generated image and text results. I could set a span of parameters and run an entire batch of ANSYS simulations back-to-back.
Continue reading “Past Work: Large-Scale Mirror Actuation”
Slot Car Track Layout Editor
When I was a kid I was gifted a vintage slot car track. Its was an early 70’s Riggen brand 1/32 scale set : two cars, two controllers, and a decent amount of track. I still have it and I occasionally pull it out and play with it. Last weekend the weather was pretty nasty outside so I decided to have some fun with it. I thought it would be cool to make a little MATLAB app that would let me create and edit track layouts before I put everything together.
