So winter vacations are about to start, and school is finally ending this year. I have had quite an interesting experience this semester. So I’ll mention a couple of my highlights this semester.
I still went with online classes, but at least I managed to go to the lab a couple times and see some CNC machinery in action, the machines were kinda huge, and all of them were running Windows 95 or 98. It was quite interesting. We had to use Floppy disks to move the G code files from our devices to them. In fact, the mouse and keyboard were not even using a USB connection and their color was beige, just like the ones in old pictures.
Now, talking about my embedded systems class, where my Raspberry Pi was the main focus. I have to say, I had a lot of fun. As soon as the final project got announced and we had the option to do basically whatever we wanted as long as it used the knowledge we gained from class, I had my mind overflowing with ideas and different ways to showcase the power of Linux to everybody!
Just kidding, I actually had a hard time coming up with something to do. It had to be something related to home automation and stuff. I got a few ideas from both Mastodon and Discord, and I settled on a simple security system.
I made a Telegram bot that received notifications every time the system perceived an intruder (An ultrasonic sensor attached to a door which measured a huge distance when opened) and took a picture, it also gave the option to start a video recording, take more pics and stuff.
I also added a simple web interface to access those files, protected in a simple manner via htpasswd, and yeah, it wasn’t really that complicated, but it was still the best project in class (Let’s say most of my classmates didn’t put that much effort, sadly) and I had a lot of fun messing around with Python and the Raspberry itself.
Finally, I still have some final projects to deliver, but they are nothing as complicated, and they are also done in teams. I have to say I dislike to work with teams but it does take a lot of the pressure from me, and in a weird way I have more people to blame other than me if it goes wrong, although deep inside me I know I could have done better. We are doing just fine tho, so its only a matter of time until I am done with everything.
There was only one class where everything could have gone wrong, I still had 3 assignments to do, and even one exam. But all of a sudden, during today’s class, the teacher told us that he was going to cancel everything except for one of them, which was the easiest of the bunch!
You’ll see, he never actually mentioned any of the homework, it was just there in the calendar and we assumed we had to do it, but he recognized he didn’t actually taught us any of the topics of those assignments at the right time, so he decided to let us free, and I am really, really grateful for that.
All I have left is a single class, the one class I actually never managed to completely understand, but I will pass, or that’s what I hope. Just a final project, and exam, and I am done! Let the holidays begin!
This has been day 62 of #100DaysToOffload