Difference between revisions of "Students/MikeTeall"

Revision as of 01:36, 9 March 2010

Hello

My name is Mike Teall, I am a Junior Year ICAM major through the Visual Arts department. I wanted to be an ICAM major because for whatever silly reason, I thought I would learn about Graphic Design and Programming. I have since found out that the ICAM major does not focus Graphic Arts at all and the programming is very limited. I have decided to stick it out anyways and learn that other stuff on my own and hopefully having an ICAM degree will help me as well. I am taking this class as my two quarter A/B requirement for my major. I have between a novice level and mild enthusiast level interest in electronics. I have done some soldering, wire stripping, etc. I replaced the power jack on my girlfriend's laptop, I put a new barrel connector on my power adapter for my laptop as well. I have put together several desktop systems, including my most current one which has an Intel i7 920 processor running at 3.7 Ghz with a gigantic air cooler, 6 Gigabytes of ddr3 ram running at 1600 Mhz, an ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card running crossfire x, 2 terabytes of hard disk space running in a RAID configuration, and a 750 watt power supply with a really nice case. I do not know all the ins and outs of all electronics, but I have a decent basic understanding and some limited experience to bring to the classroom with me. I am also interested in cutting edge electronics in general and feel this class would be fun for me along with giving me the most skills out of the A/B class sequences for the ICAM major in addition to providing me with some of the skills necessary to complete the ICAM senior project.

Midterm Project

"Mercury Tilt Switch"

Materials: 4 mercury tilt switches, 1 on/off toggle switch, one toilet float ball, sound chip from a birthday card, wire, solder, hot glue gun, particle board.

I cut the top off the float ball and removed the stem as well. I cut out a round piece of particle board and drilled a hole in the middle to fit inside. I then glued the 4 mercury switches down on the particle board. I then wired all 4 of them along with the toggle switch in series, which I connected to the sound chip. The sound will only play if the toggle switch is on, and the device is held level. All 4 mercury switches must have the ball of liquid mercury touching the two leads on the inside for the sound to play. A tilt of only a couple degrees will break the circuit.

Final Project

I am going to make a 5x5 led matrix that displays different ordered sequences at varying speeds depending on analog user input. The matrix will have 25 LED's being controlled by only 10 digital outputs of the Arduino. I will also be utilizing a couple analog inputs for my user control mechanism, which happens to be an old analog joystick for computer flight games. Since there is an X and Y axis, I will use them accordingly to switch between patterned sequences and change the speed as well. I will see what I can do with the code to make it interesting for the class.

Field Research Listed Below:

If I could link together several devices all utilizing Cell Processors in a home network as they were intended and designed for, I would have tremendous computing power. Instead I only have one, in my Sony Playstation 3....

If I had the knowledge and the opportunity to operate and manipulate the HAARP antennas, I would carry out epic weather experiments.

Oh the fun I would have with Hubble.... I think some of the best artwork in history has come from pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope. Given the opportunity to control Hubble, I would probably do long exposures on dark areas with no stars.

Playing with the Large Hadron Collider must be a blast.... Literally

If I had control over all of the ATM machines and their networks, this girl wouldn't be the only one to pee herself...