2/2/2015: Still no word back from Hudson. I made photocopies of Brett Lohr’s culmination project paperwork and spent some time going through it with JH. Brett did a lot of work on getting Medialon to interpret the position data from the DWU and documented it well. JH suggested I reach out to Brett and ask if he still as a copy of his Medialon file which he can send me. JH also said I should get in touch with John Robinson and request a PC with a Medialon Lite license for my project. 0.5 hour.
1/30/2015: Hudson Scenic haven’t responded to JH’s email, and he is getting frustrated with them (apparently they have been bad about responding to him for a while now). We may end up asking Creative Conners if they are willing to loan us one of their winch systems to work with instead.
I got JH to sign the Faculty Mentor Agreement, and I also took a look through the school’s archive of Culmination Projects to find one done by Brett Lohr back in 2007. He did some work analyzing the DWU’s data protocol and integrating it with Medialon. I confirmed we still have the documents he created and will go through them thoroughly next week. 0.5 hour.
1/29/2015: JH sent the proposal email to Hudson Scenic.
1/28/2015: First meeting of Culmination Project class. Presented basic outlines of our project ideas. Discussed using OpenLab, scheduling work throughout the semester, selecting a faculty mentor, and what paperwork is due at the next class meeting. 1 hour.
John Huntington (JH) agreed to be my faculty mentor for the project. He recommended narrowing the scope of the project to a single axis of motion. It will look better to present a simple system that performs with a high degree of precision and reliability than a more complex system that doesn’t work well at all. We also briefly discussed some prior work on reading position encoder information from the Hudson Scenic DWU into Medialon which had been done by Brett Lohr, a former student. I provided JH with a PDF of my draft proposal so he could send it to his contacts at Hudson Scenic and ask them if any pertinent updates had been made to the DWU OS since that time. 0.5 hour.
1/27/2015: Created a draft proposal, Gantt chart, and block diagram for my project, based on the practice proposal I created in Project Management last semester. 4 hours.
