ZinZam

Swot Vac

October 27, 2006

This marks the end of classes and the beginning of swot vac. Yay?

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Why Maths C is still important

August 27, 2005

Maths is about solving equations, and that is especially true for Queensland Math C.

Surds

Surds are important, they can be used for moving complex numbers and squateroots from the denominator to the numerator. The reason we want to do this is to rationalise the denominator, remember a squareroot squared is a rational number.

Example complex surd:


Example real surd:

Cis notation

Partial fractions

Partial fractions can be used to make complex expressions easier to evaluate

Integration by parts

Cramers Rule

Ironically my ELEC2004 lecturer got annoyed that they skipped over this rule in University Mathematics, but here it is, right from my Math C notebook.

Cramers rule is one of many ways we were taught to solve a system of equations. In the example I have an imaginary set of two simultaneous equations with variables x1 and x2 with answer vector (s1, s2)

Expansion using pascals triangle

I should have never forgotton this, it would've been so useful had I remembered it




This is only a taste of what math C offers. It really is useful stuff for engineering. Other stuff studied includes first order differential equations, more integration, more matrix theory, probability theory etc... It is all stuff used in engineering and computer science.

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Limits

August 17, 2005

Let us for a second cover some theory on limits. Sometimes in mathematics for an infinite sum we can work out a limit and find a real answer that we can express as a known quantity.

For example, the sequence (you need a MathML enabled browser/plugin to view this page)



We can take the limit of:



This gives us the constant


The same can be applied to other systems. Now I pose the following question:

We can construct a snowflake by taking the following steps:

1. Draw a triangle


2. Divide it's side length into three


3. Draw a triangle of 1/3rd length in the middle third of the side



4. Repeat forever




So now heres the questions:

Q. I want to measure the preimeter of the snowflake, what is the answer?

Q. If the side of the original triangle is 1m and I am traveling at 1m/s, how many seconds does it take to have travelled distance but have zero displacement.

Q. If the snowflake's unit length was now 1mm and the atomic radius of a water molecule was close enough to that of a water molecue (0.65Ã…), and the snowflake was densly packed, how long would it now take travelling at 0.001m/s.

Yes these questions have answers, but I won't reveal them until someone has a go at answering them ;)

MathML in Mozilla/Firefox. (There are other plugins for Internet Explorer users on the internet.)

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STK500

May 07, 2005

I got my STK500 (Atmel AVR Starter Kit) yesterday, after a little battling with the courier, I got it two days and several hours after I was supposed to. The good thing about it is I wasn't distracted during the week, the bad part is that I didn't have it during the week. So you win some you lose some.

First up I had an ordeal that AVR studio 4 on my laptop wouldn't communicate with the STK(500), it would just appear to freeze. (I was using a Belkin USB->Serial adapter). So I restarted my computer once, twice, reinstalled AVR Studio 4, restarted, installed AVR Studio SP2. Still not working, blast, at least by now I figured unplugging the USB device would cause AVR Studio to unfreeze itself. I tried changing serial port settings, to no avail.

I then jumped on the AVRFreaks website and went a searching the forums. There is alot of talk about updating the onboard firmware and how because of the bootloader on the onboard AT90s8535 it's a no risk operation. So I got and try that. Ohh damn, update failed, The lights on the demo program on the AT90s8515, a chip I had used the semester before in COMP1300 weren't lighting up. So I try to download the firmware again, damn the thing failed again, but this time the demo chip is working, odd. While its working it still won't communicate with AVR Studio.

After a few tries of that I then go and try it on a desktop computer with a real serial port. At first I was getting trouble, but then I realised the helper application for the Remote Control of my Pinnacle TV card has got control of the serial port, after terminating that system tray program I now am able to communicate with the serial port. AVR Studio still doesn't like the board, so I go and try updating the firmware. It takes it time to download, then verify and it works. Now AVR Studio on the desktop is able to communicate with my STK500 and download programs to it. So now I go and try to use it on my laptop, and low and behold it starts to work now.

So now I have a working STK500 using my fake serial port. Hooray...

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Progress

May 01, 2005

I have made absolutely zero progress on the design of my site. Instead I have been studying Mech2300, and working on the code and PCB design for Metr2800.

I will take any suggestions for the design of my site as long as their not bad ones. My title is also lame and I am open to suggestions on changes to make to it, as long as their not lamer.

I am going to install the gravatar plugin for wordpress when I get the time to do it.

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