Working in an engineering domain of electrical engineering and computer science, female engineers are clearly the minority, at least in my country. For example the ETH Zurich has less than 30% female students. The US National Science Foundation had published articles on that subject: Interestingly, 70% of young girls are interested in math and science, but they lose that interest afterwards.
Verizon Commercial 2014 (Source: Youtube)
At the university the mid-term presentations are due. Which reminds me about the importance to use the right terms and keywords not only for scientific presentations and abstracts, but as well to use and know the correct terms in any presentation or documentation. A have been pointed to an interesting concept: The Turbo Encabulator, described in this data sheet:
Turboencabulator
University research projects can be a lot fun, and are very challenging the same time. The good thing is that there is always someting new to learn :-).
This week-end I was working on my Internet of Things (IoT) project, based on a Freescale KL15Z and a nRF24L01+ transceiver. In essence it is a wireless data logger. For this, I only can afford a few micro amps consumed by the whole board over an extended period of time. I mean 21 micro amps for running a whole board with sensor, EEPROM, wireless transceiver, operating system and an ARM Cortex-M0+ ready to crunch numbers at 20 MHz 🙂
21 micro amps for wireless sensor node (when not sending)
It has been a very successful racing week in Silverstone/UK: The AMZ Formula Student team, formed by students of the ETH Zurich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, won the first overall place at this prestigious engineering event!
Julier in Silverstone (Picture: Benjamin Hildebrandt)
The Pololu Zumo chassis is nearly perfect for my needs: it is small and compact, and neatly works with the FRDM-KL25Z board. I’m able to use it for line following or maze solving. But it lacks a position (quadrature) encoder on the wheels which is either very useful or even required for the lecture assignments for my next class. The Pololu Zumo chassis mainly has been designed for Robot-Sumo competitions, where such quadrature sensors are not really needed. Pololu offers optical quadrature sensors for their 42×19 mm wheel which I used in this project. So why not adding these sensors to the Zumo chassis?
FRDM-Robot with Quadrature Sensors Mounted
While weather is bad and Switzerland suffers from record high rain water levels, the Formula Student “julier” team was testing their race car this week-end after the rollout. This time to test the 4WD with more torque. Plus water-resistance ;-). So here are impressions, pictures and a video from this week-end:
Julier Formula Student Race Car
Last Thursday the new Formula Student race car named ‘julier’ had its rollout to the public at Sauber Motorsports in Hinwil, Switzerland. Again a fully electrical racing car, but this time with 4-wheel drive, improved aero-pack and electronics, and able to get from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.6 seconds!
Julier racing (Source Benjamin Hildebrandt)
Yesterday was a great day: The book “Software Engineering for Embedded Systems” finally arrived 🙂 :
Software Engineering for Embedded Systems
Why I’m excited about this? Because I had the honor to contribute a chapter to that book 🙂
In my view: the world needs more engineers to solve all the problems.
Question: How to recruit future engineers?
Answer: Show young people that engineering is a lot of fun!
Polygraph in Action
MCU on Eclipse 