TGIFF

TGIFF!

It's Friday again, in which I summarize all of the good, bad, and ugly things that happened to me this past week.

Job search: It's been over three weeks with my interview @ Diebold. They said to not contact them, that they would get back with me in a few weeks. My dad (engineer with 30+ years of experience) said that if they really had interest, they would have gotten back with me within a few days. That's really deflating. They didn't want to wait for me to do the interview during spring break, and the people who interviewed me seemed to really like me, so I thought I'd at least be in the running? I decided to drop my HR contact an email to see what's up; I can see that the position is still open when I log on to their website. A handful of other companies that I've talked to who said that they'd contact me with a yes: interview or a no: not interested have not got back with me, and have been ignoring weeks of communication attempts. So professional.

Senior Design: We're almost there! The circuit needs a little tweaking to work optimally, and then we just need to integrate it with our microcontroller and get those numbers to start pumping out. I finished making the enclosure for it. I've seen a dremel tool in use before, but I've never done it myself. Had to practice first:

Practicing: I got better pretty quickly

Final Result: not too shabby

I don't know if I've ever outlined what our project is, but it is a smart meter. It's basically an electrical meter like the ones on your house that measures the power you consume. It's "smart" because unlike the old-style meters that require a power company employee to walk up to each meter to take the reading (go look at your meter, there are rotary dials and junk that show how much you've used), it can send all of that information wirelessly to the power company. They can also do neat things like real-time pricing, in which you get charged less when there is less demand for power, and more for when power is in high demand (it still comes out to be a net savings for the consumer, and is much nicer on the environment). For our project, we're just using the lower voltage out of a wall socket instead of the higher voltage that comes into your house (for safety and simplicity). We can plug a load into the socket on the top of the box and measure how much power it's using, and do other stuff with that data. Pretty much a huge pain in the ass. 

Going to see The Hunger Games tonight, and getting a lot of work knocked out over the weekend. This ride ain't over yet.

TGIFF!