ngenetzky / project_notebook

The project notebook is on a website.

Nathan Genetzky's Project Notebook

Introduction

This is an electronic notebook that will be used to record progress as projects are worked on. The primary purpose of the documents is to provide informal documentation that another individual could follow to achieve similar results. There are not strict formatting standards, but eventually more concrete guidelines will be created.

Project Notebook

The inspiration for this notebook arose from the usage of a research notebook used while working on undergraduate research and from project notebooks kept for a lab/project based course at South Dakota State University (SDSU). The benefits of documenting the work was very apparent.

A large percentage of the work and results was in digital form. I would collect arrays of measurements, perform calculations, and create graphs. Calculations were performed using matlab scripts, simulations were created in PSpice, and measurements were obtained from oscilloscopes or simulations. Typically a PDF could be created that contained a representation of the data and then it could be printed and pasted into the paper notebook.

When the notebook was started I considered a few of the [Desired Properties of a Project Notebook][1]. It is important to tie together the work done in a particular time period. The files with the format: "YYYY-MM-DD.md" should describe the work done on a day; ([Ideas about Day markdown][2]) discusses about possible organization of content.

Internet of Things with Particle Devices

Particle is a type of a microcontroller that has wifi capabilities. An introduction to the capability provided by the particle devices is given in [Intro to Particle][9], and an example of its usage in [Using Particle Cloud][3]. Most of the code for projects involving particle devices is on a github repository, [Particle Projects][4].

There are various communication protocols supported by the Particle devices. The I2C projects were described and compared in [I2C on Particle][6]. CAN communication was discussed in [Can with Particle][7].

One of my projects demonstrates controlling an RGB light from Matlab or an android phone (via Tasker). The project is described in [this note][5], and most of the code can be found in /2016/06/05 or on the repository on that day.

Programming

C++

C++ is fundamental for programming most embedded systems. It is important to keep up to date with advancements in the language. SDSU teaches C++98 standard, but the C++11 and C++14 standards have improved the language significantly. In [Modern Cpp in Embedded][8] I reviewed literature and documented what I learned or thought was important.

[1]: {% post_url 2016-05-10-desired-properties-of-the-notebook %} [2]: {% post_url 2016-05-11-ideas-about-day-markdown %} [3]: {% post_url 2016-06-08-using-particle-cloud %} [4]: https://github.com/NGenetzky/particle-projects [5]: {% post_url 2016-06-05-particle-code-now-on-github %} [6]: {% post_url 2016-05-11-i2c-on-particle %} [7]: {% post_url 2016-05-16-can-with-particle %} [8]: {% post_url 2016-05-16-modern-cpp-in-embedded-systems %} [9]: {% post_url 2016-06-24-intro-to-particle %}