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I know, I’m not being very good at publishing stuff lately, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything… It is more like I’m “too busy lately” so let me just give a brief summary of the stuff I’m working on this semester:

1. BilliSub (AUV): This is my senior design project with six Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. This project is about designing an underwater robot to compete in the AUVSI contest that will take place this summer in San Francisco. For more information on this project go to the BilliSub’s website (http://csss.slu.edu/~auv)
2. Research: At SLU I work as a Research Assistant for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and these are the projects I have done working for them so far:
   • SD card data collector: I am working on this project right now which consists on collecting data from different sensors on an airplane and save that data into a regular SD card to be read once the airplane lands.
   • Intelligent Bridge: I developed a program that collects a bunch of sensor data measuring the stress on different parts of a scaled bridge and calculates the virtual position of a train cart.
3. CubeSat: This project is one of the most interesting and  highly funded at Saint Louis University. It is about making a small (10×10x10cm) satellite that will be launched to space as soon as it gets done. One of the needs of that project is to have a good power board that can charge LIPO batteries and provide enough power out of the multiple solar cells surrounding the satellite.   
4. IEEE Projects: As president of the IEEE student branch association, I am involved in different activities that are currently still being developed:
   1. Micro Sumo collaborative robots: I started this project to make a workshop at a high school here in Saint Louis. Sadly we didn’t have the chance to give the actual workshop, but the robots are still being developed. Check this link to know more about this project.
   2. Disco Lights: Jesus Dominguez, mechanical engineer here at SLU, started this project and I helped him improve the idea by using the SkyRGB that Ricardo Gomez and I designed for Campus Party in El Salvador. To know more about the progress of this project check out this link.
   3. BOEING and SLU robotics show case
5. Contests: I like to compete in different contests, and here in the States there are some interesting ones:
   1. I2P: The Idea To Product contest is about presenting a new and innovative idea to several judges from the industry. The first stage of this contest took place at SLU on November the 6th of 2009. Thanks to the BillikenBot Project, Blanca Ollero and I got the 2nd place ($1000). The next step is the regional I2P competition against universities from Texas, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana in March.
   2. Black-Box: This regional competition was about Electronics analysis. On November 14th Priyam Chackravarty and I went, with another two teams from the IEEE student branch at SLU, to the University of Missouri-Rolla to participate in this interesting contest. We didn’t have any experience with this kind of competition but we got 2nd place ($300) anyway, so we were pretty happy about that.
6. Campus Party: there is no way I miss that week… Campus Party time comes and I am there, working hard to coordinate the Robotics Area along with Jose J. Ariza. this year will be full of news about this interesting project such as the next edition of Campus Party: Campus Party Europe.

And that is why I don’t have the time I need to write on my blogs… But I will do my best to keep up and keeping you informed about all this stuff!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 3:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.