JeremyBlum.com

This past Thursday marked the start of my sophomore classes at Cornell University.  I’ve decided that I’m going to affiliate with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Major, and I’m also hoping to pursue a business minor.  However, classes have not been at the front of mind recently; instead, I’ve been far more focused on Cornell’s Solar Decathlon Team.  As I have mentioned before in my blog, I’m the Engineering Controls Team leader for Cornell’s “Silo House” entry into the bi-annual competition.  While I did not stay up at Cornell for the past summer as some other team member’s did, I did stop by for a while to get some work done on the home’s entertainment systems, and I spent a good amount of time maintaining and developing the back-end of our website.  About a week before the start of classes, I made my way up to the NY state fair grounds in Syracuse for 4 days, where the house will be on display until the competition in October.  So here’s the point of this post: If you live anywhere remotely close to Syracuse, go check out the house at the fair! It’s coming along really well, and if I do say so myself, it looks awesome!  We’re offering tours for as little as $2, and I’ll be giving some of the tours.  You can also check out pictures of the house on our website, and I’m hoping to have a virtual fly-through available soon.

This is a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for over a year now. A while back, a friend got me this robotic claw kit from thinkgeek, basically to make fun of my prosthetics research.  It’s simple enough…A wired controller is connected to the claw and has a few levers for eliciting movement from the arm’s various motors.  As you might expect, I got bored with picking up blocks rather quickly.  I instantly had the idea to pick up blocks remotely!  Oh what fun that would be!  To accomplish this I employed one of my favorite microcontrollers, the parallax propeller. Admittedly, the propeller is overkill for this project, but it’s what I happened to have on hand–It has 8 cores and I am only using one, but this is only v1 of the claw, and I hope to take better advantage of this chip in the future.  The propeller chip communicates with a small web server (also sold by parallax) via a serial connection.  I’ve even setup a network webcam, and embedded the feed in the control webpage, so I can easily control the claw from anywhere in the world!

Read on for pictures, source-code, a video, and a walk-through of the system!

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Upgrading the RAM in your laptop can be surprisingly difficult, especially if one stick is located under the keyboard. In this tutorial, I walk you through the steps needed to replace RAM on most laptops. Enjoy!

Well, solid state hard drives seem to be all the rage these days, so I figured I’d try one out in my Dell D630 Laptop.  After doing some research, Kingston’s SSD Now drive series looked like the best bang for the buck, so I ordered it.  Check out my review of the drive below.