Archive for February, 2010

National debt + Time

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

This week’s theme was the “scale of time increments”; that there are “approximately 365.242199 days in a year. But that number is changing…constantly. Atomic clocks count 9,192,631,770 cycles per second of the cesium-133 atoms to maintain a precise second. Time operates differently depending on the scale of the time increment. Our perception of time is often bound by measurements of time that we cannot perceive. How can we reinterpret these out-of-scale increments into increments we can understand?”

Our assignment was to imagine a relational clock that corresponds to a time scale that is not normally perceivable to humans. (more…)

Romance Lighting Sensor

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

For our next assignment we were tasked with creating a romance lighting sensor. After multiple hours on the first two projects, this exercise went surprisingly well. Here the coordinator is set-up in API mode (note that both xbees don’t have to be API enabled). It’s essential that the base station radio–the one that’s attached to the Arduino–be in API mode so that it can report the incoming I/O frames arriving from the remote sensor radio. (more…)

Zipcar… continued

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

This week we were asked to continue our research into our chosen product/service, including focus on project origin, where product or service started and other findings.

As of 25 December 2009, Zipcar’s worldwide fleet consists of roughly 70 distinct models from auto Audi, BMW, Citroen, Ford, Honda, Kia, Mazda, MINI Cooper, Nissan, Pontiac, Scion, Smart, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo. Each vehicle has a home location: a reserved parking space located on a street, driveway, or neighborhood parking lot in the member’s area. My review of Zipcar and car sharing services continues:

zipcarfinal1