Phew, the first quarter of my exchange study is almost over. So far, the stay here in the Netherlands have been very exciting. First of all, we did an awesome project creating a quad rotor controller using a joystick to fly. A demo of the previous years group can be found here. We were actually able to make it work like in this video. The hardware consists of a Xilinx Spartan 3E starter kit running the X32 CPU core developed here at TU-Delft, a PC with serial link to the FPGA board, a joystick connected to the PC, and the Quad Rotor itself connected to the FPGA board via a modified serial link. We implemented the control software, signal filtering etc on the X32 in C, and after optimizations, we had a cycle time almost half of the required, and it flew!

The other course I’ve been taking is a seminar on wireless sensor network, which handled nearly all aspects of this topic, having students present a paper on a certain topic each week. I presented a paper on reliable energy aware routing, which was very interesting.

Lastly, I have a course in distributed algorithms, which will finish on April the 4th with an exam. The course teaches various distributed algorithms for synchronization, global state detection, deadlock, locking etc, and goes through several P2P protocols as well.

After this quarter I’ll also go home to Norway for a short vacation, finally :)