My son finished the last of his college application essays today—a letter of intent for the College of Creative Studies at UCSB.  UCSB is more of a safety school for him than a first-choice one, but they have a decent CS department, and the College of Creative Studies is a better honors program than the other UC campuses have.  It looks like that program provides enough flexibility in the general ed requirements that he would have relatively few courses to take that he did not choose for himself—certainly less than the rather specific laundry lists of UCSD colleges or UCB.

I had to bicycle down to the post office to mail paper copies of the application forms to the College of Creative Studies, because my son was running late for his afternoon appointment, and the forms really needed to be postmarked today.  It seemed a bit weird and old-fashioned to be sticking stamps on a big envelope and mailing it from the post office for a college application.  Of course, the College of Creative Studies is small enough that they can’t really afford to set up their own on-line application system, and UC is not about to modify their system to accommodate a small college on one campus.

Now that he has finally finished his essays, I’m hoping to get him to spend some time on two subjects he’s been neglecting: group theory and updating the data logger to work with the Freescale processors (along with lots of other upgrades requested on the bitbucket site).  I’ll have to tell the lab staff soon which processors the students will be buying for the spring quarter Applied Circuits course.  If the data logger is not working with the KL25Z boards, then we’ll have to continue using the Arduinos.  The Arduinos worked well enough last year, but we could run much higher sampling rates and higher resolution on the KL25Z boards.  I’m also wondering whether I should get a KL26Z board, which has 14-bit resolution for 3-axis acceleration measurements and 16-bit resolution for 3-axis magnetic measurements (the KL25Z board has only 12-bit resolution for 3-axis acceleration and no magnetometer).  Both boards have 48MHz ARM Cortex M0+ processors with 28kB of flash and 16kB of RAM, and use similar OpenSDA interfaces for downloading programs. The KL25Z is supported by free software from mbed.org, but the KL26Z does not seem to be (yet—they do support the KL46Z).

My son finished the last of his college application essays today—a letter of intent for the College of Creative Studies at UCSB.  UCSB is more of a safety school for him than a first-choice one, but they have a decent CS department, and the College of Creative Studies is a better honors program than the other UC campuses have.  It looks like that program provides enough flexibility in the general ed requirements that he would have relatively few courses to take that he did not choose for himself—certainly less than the rather specific laundry lists of UCSD colleges or UCB.

I had to bicycle down to the post office to mail paper copies of the application forms to the College of Creative Studies, because my son was running late for his afternoon appointment, and the forms really needed to be postmarked today.  It seemed a bit weird and old-fashioned to be sticking stamps on a big envelope and mailing it from the post office for a college application.  Of course, the College of Creative Studies is small enough that they can’t really afford to set up their own on-line application system, and UC is not about to modify their system to accommodate a small college on one campus.

Now that he has finally finished his essays, I’m hoping to get him to spend some time on two subjects he’s been neglecting: group theory and updating the data logger to work with the Freescale processors (along with lots of other upgrades requested on the bitbucket site).  I’ll have to tell the lab staff soon which processors the students will be buying for the spring quarter Applied Circuits course.  If the data logger is not working with the KL25Z boards, then we’ll have to continue using the Arduinos.  The Arduinos worked well enough last year, but we could run much higher sampling rates and higher resolution on the KL25Z boards.  I’m also wondering whether I should get a KL26Z board, which has 14-bit resolution for 3-axis acceleration measurements and 16-bit resolution for 3-axis magnetic measurements (the KL25Z board has only 12-bit resolution for 3-axis acceleration and no magnetometer).  Both boards have 48MHz ARM Cortex M0+ processors with 28kB of flash and 16kB of RAM, and use similar OpenSDA interfaces for downloading programs. The KL25Z is supported by free software from mbed.org, but the KL26Z does not seem to be (yet—they do support the KL46Z).