Recently I've spent more time helping a friend out in fixing up a 2002 Subaru Impreza WRX. We've had quite a bit of fun trying to find all of the missing parts, repairing damage, upgrading the suspension and exhaust, and updating the interior.

The Grand Cherokee hasn't had too many issues. I had a seal break on the side of the radiator which caused a nice waterfall of coolant. After getting the radiator replaced I was pleasantly surprised how much better the AC was performing (apparently the radiator was full of crud blocking most airflow to the AC's condenser). The paint I had put on the bumpers and cladding (Duplicolor Bumper Coating -- FB 109 Dark Charcoal) is starting to flake off. I thought I had prepped the bumper relatively well but the paint still coming off. I'm considering getting either painted limited bumpers and cladding or putting a truck bed coating on them. I also had an issue with the fuel pump relay. The engine was erratically running terrible--idle jumped all over and giving extra throttle only made it worse. I wasn't sure what the issue was so I consulted a friend who is a Jeep mechanic and he suggested I check whether the contacts were bad on the fuel pump relay. I replaced the relay and I haven't had any issues since.

As a senior design project for ECE4007 at the Georgia Institute of Technology we designed an autonomous path following convoy, where the leading vehicle was manually controlled and the trailing vehicles were autonomous. The system was placed on a Redcat Racing Lightning EPX DRIFT 1/10 Scale On Road RC car and was controlled by an Altera DE2 FPGA Development Board which was connected to a custom I/O Daughter Board with 3 Pixart Infrared Cameras from Nintendo Wii Remotes and custom rear wheel encoders.

The Path-following Autonomous Convoy with Multiple Asynchronous Nodes (PACMAN) consists of two or more Autonomous Convoy Vehicles (ACVs) that follow the path designated by a lead vehicle without any form of communication between leader and followers. Each ACV employs infrared cameras to detect IR LEDs on the vehicle it follows; tracking information from the camera pair is processed by an FPGA control unit and dictates where the ACV should be driven. The PACMAN project utilizes adapted remote-controlled cars as convenient and inexpensive ACVs, but is meant to serve as a proof of concept for future use in full-size military convoy vehicles.

To read more about it click here or go to: http://www.ewoutvb.com/4007/

Fixing up the Jeep seems to be a never ending project. Every time we fix one thing we'll find at least two more problems...

I'm going to try to keep track of the maintenance and replacements on the Jeep from now on. This is what I've done so far...

As a project for ECE4180, Embedded Systems and Designs, at the Georgia Institute of Technology we designed an automated gigapixel acquisition system. The system was created to fulfill our requirement to create an embedded solution with an eBox 2300.

Taking photographs to stitch together later to create high detail such as gigapixel panoramas requires precise, repetitive, and meticulous camera positioning for the tens to hundreds of images required. The purpose of this project was to design a motorized and automated panorama head so that a panorama could be taken automatically without repetitive work by the user, such as accurately adjusting the camera's direction for every picture.

A user interface was made to allow the system’s user to input parameters for the camera, lens, and percent overlap between the images. The software estimates the horizontal and vertical field of view of the panorama, the number of images required to form the panorama, and the estimated gigapixels count contained in the panorama and displays this data on the interface.

A FTP server on the computer used makes the images taken with the camera avaliable via FTP. The computer can be connected to via a wired or wireless network connection to access the system remotely while waiting on the system to complete the panorama.

Test results of the system show that it is capable of producing very high detail panoramas without requiring the user to manually adjust the camera for each shot, instead the whole panorama is taken automatically including the shutter release.

To read more about it click here or go to: http://www.ewoutvb.com/4180/