Ricardo's Place Robotics, machine learning, or simply random thoughts!

My Old Projects or Why You Should Document and Share Your Stuff Online

Today, I’ve decided to write something to make sure I’m not going to forget, again, about my old projects. Another reason for this post is to be an incentive for sharing / publishing your work online. If I had published everything online, as I was developing, I would not need to write a post about things from the past like I’m doing right now ;)  

When I was still an undergrad student (2000-2005), mobile phones with good quality cameras were not available and only in 2004 (or 2005?) I got one with a really noisy, probably VGA, camera. I was only able to have such a phone because I found an unsolvable bug on my old one, while still on guarantee, and they had no choice but give me a better one (Brazil has some really nice consumer protection laws). Also, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, etc were not available and it was quite common to lose data from time to time after a problem with a hard drive.

During my years as an undergrad Electrical Engineering student, I’ve developed some interesting projects, but most of them I’ve not saved any picture, schematic, etc. For one of my analog electronics modules, my group designed a circuit to multiply two input signals using only transistors. I still remember that Analog Devices had one IC that could do exactly what we struggled to build for that module. The control systems module demanded us to develop an analog PID controller and I implemented a controller for CPU fans. Later on, I’ve worked on a Neural Network implementation using FPGA that should be able to recognise simple numbers. All those projects are lost, since I don’t have backup of anything or photos. My first project to have a digital picture saved was during the microcontrollers module. My group designed a home automation system, based on 8051, where you could activate relays through DTMF. Here is the picture (we recycled my old 56K USRobotics faxmodem plastic enclosure):

DARVIT
DARVIT - 8051 based home automation system.

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Hello, World!

This is my first attempt using Jekyll. It all started because my colleague, Massimiliano, showed me his brand new Jekyll based website. Actually, I’d tried Jekyll before, but when I read the first lines asking me to install Ruby, RubyGems, NodeJS and then install Jekyll, I instantaneously gave up. I was way too used to deploy and admin WordPress websites, so I could not accept the idea of not being able to have a web-only system. Luckily, Github does everything and it’s NOT necessary to install anything on you computer to use Jekyll with Github!

My plan, for the future, is to keep this website updated with what I’m currently doing (and, maybe, try to document some old projects too).

And, finally, here it is:

Hello, World!

This website was created using the Lanyon theme.