Now that the semester has picked up, I’m feeling a little lost in the sea of uncertainty that i seem to be swimming in during my last few months as an undergrad. Even though I’m on the precipice of graduating, I feel like nothing is really going to change. I’ll probably be going to grad school here next Fall, and I’ll be working at the same lab I’ve worked at for the past 2 years. Don’t get me wrong, the experience has been great, but I feel like the indefinite transition between undergrad life and graduate studies fails to demarcate the change that I wanted to see in my life at this point.

I’ve been attending Texas A&M for almost 6 years now, and here I am committing to at least another two years. I’ve changed a lot during my time here, but I’m still not the person I want to be. Perhaps it’s easier to see turning points when looking back on your life, but I sometimes don’t feel like entering graduate school will be the turning point that I’ve been looking for.

Part of the problem is that my last few semesters as an undergraduate have been much more like the life of a grad student than that of an undergrad. I took fewer classes, devoted most of my time to research projects, and just generally lived like a grad student. The biggest difference at this point is really the difference in motivations. As an undergrad, the research that I did and the contributions I made were secondary to the educational process of an undergraduate career. Perhaps the amount of time I’ve spent here has lent a certain amount of cynicism to my analysis of the undergrad experience here. One thing that has always surprised me is how reticent I am to do good work for easy classes. I think when education is geared toward the lowest common denominator, you get equally uninspiring results. Recognition is not given for outstanding work, only for work that meets the criteria. When you get into a pattern of doing work like this, “just to do it”, you lose any stake that you might have had in creating the work. Work loses any essence of personal expression, it is simply a canned response to a stock question for a rubber stamp on an ivory parchment.

I am tired of undergrad education because I’m tired of mindlessly proving that I know what I know. What counts in the real world is the ability to synthesize knowledge into productive action. Studying for a test is not productive. Applying a skill in a real world situation is. Part of me feels like I’ve been wasting my time and money on these things. Really though, I’ve been paying for the opportunity to prove that I know what I know. I wish I would have understood this better when I entered undergrad. You are not paying to be educated, you educate yourself. You are paying so that you can be systematically evaluated by your professors and judged competent for a degree. If I had come to college with this point of view, I would have graduated 2 years ago.

So where does that leave me now? Despite my best efforts not to, I’m graduating in may with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. I have gotten a ton of experience, and I’ve learned quite a few things, but I still wonder if I will struggle with the system in graduate school the same way I have in undergrad. Approaching it with the mindset I wished I had when I entered college might be a good start: I am attending graduate school to be systematically evaluated on my ability to synthesize cutting edge research concepts into coherent systems. I think this might be a little closer to the kind of turning point I’ve been searching for anyway. I had no idea what I wanted out of undergrad. I know exactly what I want out of grad school.

Got a new remix for ya. This one comes from a former local band here in College Station, The Flyers. You can find the original (and the rest of their album) on iTunes. This one’s a real slow burner.

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the north pole (moeller remix)

For the past couple days I haven’t been able to pull myself away from my new APC40. This thing is like crack. This morning, I was chatting with my friend and fellow producer Gard Groth, and he sent me a cut of some stuff he’d been working on in Logic. After listening, I threw it into Ableton and made a quick remix in the 15 minutes I had before work.

kiano remix

You can tell a lot about a person from their resume. Just today I had the chance to go back in time and look at a number of my old resumes, and I thought it would be fun to show them off. I’ll do this in reverse chronological order, so you can see the progression as it happened.

Freshman Year
The one that started it all… Not bad on design, considering it was my freshman year. Pretty light on experience/information though.

Sophomore Year
HA, I have to laugh at myself after looking at this resume. Loving the cheesy dropshadow on my name. Finally got some real experience to put on the resume, despite it only being my second year at TAMU. The internship I got after my freshman year really paid off, and the CAD skills I refined would help me through the rest of my career.

Junior Year, just after my NI internship
Not much has changed since Sophomore year, other than another internship at National Instruments. After that experience, my objective statement changed to: “An internship at a company that provides both an outlet for my talents in computer engineering as well as opportunities to move into leadership and project management responsibilities, even as an intern.” I had a much better idea of where I wanted to go, but I was still not sure how I was going to get there.

2007
This was the first resume I created after my GPA had dropped significantly. Despite this, I had another two internships under my belt: one with Hewlett Packard, and a second internship with National Instruments. Previous to this, my GPA had been my big selling point; after it fell, I felt it would be better to focus on different aspects of my experience instead. This was the first time that I really put some personality into my resume. I hadn’t found what I was looking for yet, but I had started to find myself.

2009
My favorite resume so far. After a year and a half in a research lab, my experience had grown significantly. I wanted a way to better visualize the time I had spent while I was in school, so the split column layout seemed appropriate.

My work on the happyfuntouch project has evolved into a paper which was recently accepted to the 4th conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, held at the MIT Media lab in Janurary next year.

Here’s the paper:
Scanning FTIR: Unobtrusive Optoelectronic Multi-Touch Sensing through Waveguide Transmissivity Imaging.

I’m super excited about the conference, along with meeting a bunch of my heroes in the field. They’re also hosting several workshops on day two, and I will be attending the workshop on Making Textile Sensors from Scratch.

And here we are with the most current iteration of the PCB design. Previously, I had assumed that making all the modules the same was the best solution for this design. In reality, this was only advantageous in terms of manufacturing ease. Separating the phototransistors and LEDs and placing them on different boards allowed a level of miniaturization and integration that I couldn’t achieve before.

In addition, photodiodes were used in place of phototransistors to improve the response of the touch screen and to meet our 100 fps refresh rate target.

Finally here is a picture showing each iteration side-by-side so you can get a feel for how much smaller these boards are.

Feeling much more confident in my own soldering skills, I took the design of the previous evolution to the next logical stage. Featuring 8 phototransistors and 7 LEDs, these boards represent the refinement of the previous design. Feeling good about my SMD soldering abilities, I went with TSSOP ICs and 1206 and 0805 components otherwise. Ribbon cable connectors were still used, though this would be the last iteration to do so.

Unfortunately, an unseen problem with the previous module’s LED driver configuration made its way to this prototype as well. The ULN2003A current-sink driver I was using had it’s ground connected to the load resistor for the LEDs to save space on the board layout. Unfortunately, this meant that when any LED was turned on the ground for the ULN2003 was lifted, and all of the other LEDs would glow very dimly. This wasn’t noticed in the previous iteration which was very sensitive to ambient lighting issues, but the precision of this prototype made the problem clear as day.

Ponoko was again used to manufacture a laser cut enclosure seen in the pictures below. This enclosure design would prove to be the biggest design leap in this iteration.

After the depressing reality of my broken $300 PCBs, I decided to take a new tack. I wanted to try my hand at assembling these myself, so I build a slightly simplified version that had more through hole components. I still went with SMD ICs, though I chose SOIC packages, as they seemed like the easiest SMD package to solder at the time.

These boards are glued to laser cut stands from ponoko, and can be seen fully assembled on the main happyfuntouch page.

In addition to this, the boards are designed to be daisy chained together for ease of connection to a microcontroller. Daisy chained shift registers enable individual LED switching and control the enable bit of each multiplexer. 4 IO lines select the channel on the active multiplexer and are shared among all boards. Each board contains 16 multiplexed phototransistors and 6 IR LEDs.

The complete design can be seen both on the happyfuntouch page and in the picture below. It’s not easily seen, but there is a 3mm acrylic waveguide sitting on the laser cut stands. (all the optoelectronic elements are optically coupled to it)

I wanted to spice things up a little bit here and show the past/present/future design iterations of the happyfuntouch system. We’ll start out with the first PCB I ever manufactured.

I spent about $300 total on 6 of these PCBs, and had them produced and assembled in malaysia. It cost $40 shipping alone just to send the parts there, but I messed up and only sent them enough parts to make 3 complete boards. On top of all that, I used the wrong footprint for a shift register which rendered the boards useless. It was my first big failure of this project.

The boards consist of 32 multiplexed Phototransistors and 8 current-sink driven, shift-register switchable LEDs. I designed them to test the Scanning FTIR principle on a small scale, so each board has it’s own amplifier stage for the phototransistors and they cannot be daisy chained. This inefficiency was quickly realized and fixed for future iterations.