Jacob Miske: May 2019

You Breath Fresher Air when you're not in the City Anymore

It has been nice to spend days with family this week. I think that it's quite important to duly respect where you have come from and where you would like to go.

I went to Grand Haven today and I will be going to the Plymouth area tomorrow. Michigan is a pretty grand state indeed.

Cabela's Store

digging a hole

Sunset

My dad's envelope filling machine at work

Back Home and an Auto Fish Feeder

I am back home in Michigan this week. I had my last final on Friday the 25th and now I am visiting family and friends before I return to Cambridge to help write software at an internship at Shell Techworks.

I am looking forward to learning a lot this summer. Because I do not have any classes to take, I can focus all my learning on being better at embedded systems engineering.

I will likely increase my linux chops and have some decent experience in maintaining an IoT system. We'll see how it goes.

I will be adding an entry in the projects page in not too soon for my fish feeder. I did not want to ask anyone to help me feed my fish while I am in Michigan, so I devised this device to feed my goldfish while I am away. We'll see if it was a success after I get back...

Raspberry Pi Computer and portable screen

The hopper wheel I used to distribute food

Different angle

At the student radio station

Balloon Recovery Photos

I plan to post some videos of the weather balloon flight in the coming days. The photos here show the tangled wires and molex on the insulated box we used on the high atmospheric test.

I have one more final on Friday. I took the final for 6.041 this morning. After that, I come home for a week then return to Cambridge to continue work in the nearby area.

Static Hosting with AWS

I have been spending some of my spare time learning the ropes of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This service is great for handling large scale networking and internet solutions without having the hardware. AWS offers a DNS and hosting service called Route 53 which allows me to create a record set for the domain name (jacobmiske.net) and then store cloud based HTML files in another service called S3.

So, now I have jacobmiske.com and jacobmiske.net, I don't entirely know what I want to do with them yet but probably host a bunch of project pictures and videos later on.

Getting Something into the Stratosphere

Picture from the stratosphere

Rocket Motor without motor

Temperature in the balloon payload over time

My friend Diane from MIT Rocket Team took a class this semester in which the final project involved sending a high altitude weather balloon up. They asked members of the MIT RT to help support the data acquisition and GPS/radio goals. I had the privilege of helping with the data acquisition system and arranged a set of k-type thermocouples, humidity, and pRTD sensors for Diane and their classmates to use. The first image above shows a shot taken in the stratosphere of the thermocouples I worked with!

Abstract Libraries

We live in this interesting world with lots of fancy sensors and do-dads. Many of these things use microcontrollers, which are tiny computers designed often for a wide range of basic tasks, like counting, storing values, moving information, etc etc, and many of these programs use 'libraries'. A library is a bunch of generic programs which usually consist of helper functions that make a programmer's life much much easier. However, sometimes you are using the MAX31865 library and you find little gems like the above, where the programmer had to figure out the roots of some large polynomial which described the temperature dependence of a RTD element and put all of that in a helper func...

Having Fun and Writing Code

I made some garlic bread yesterday. It was pretty good. There was leftover bread and garlic from the East Side Festival which is what led to it.

The end of the semester is coming up so I've been trying to balance this work load with some fun. Friday night, my band Fred Desk performed at Steer Roast, an annual event put on by alumni of Senior Haus (a now defunct dorm at MIT).

Heading to LA this July to watch my Rocket Team data acquisition board perform. Been writing a lot of Cpp code lately...