Happy New Year! After a brief, but much-needed respite, the Enable team is back in the office, and already showing 2012 who’s boss.
We’d like to formally welcome our new co-op students, Kevin, Hank and Naheed, and we’d like to welcome Matt back for his second work term with us. Kevin and Hank will be learning the ropes with our education and training team, Matt will be working in the programming department, and Naheed will be lending his skills to marketing. We’re delighted to have all of them on board, and we can’t wait to see what new and amazing ideas they’ll bring to the table.
Um, yeah, well, it’s been a while since we posted here. The good news is, our lack of blogginess over the past couple months has been due to our abundance of busyness. In an effort to get on schedule, here is a highlight reel.
With heavy hearts, we said goodbye to a fantastic bunch of summer co-op students (thanks for the hard work, guys). In September, we welcomed back Greg and Sarah, two bright lights from the University of Waterloo, for their second co-op term with us.
Karen Smolenaars joined our team as Office Manager, and Ruth Riddell came on board as our new video editor. Hooray!
ThinkAboutIt, our series of philosophy books for kids, has been making the rounds! Since our last post, we’ve released two new books (environmental philosophy and aesthetics). Three more books will be on their way early in 2012.
We also participated in Word On The Street in Toronto, as well as Milton Green’s “Green Holiday” event. This past weekend, we celebrated with an official launch party.
Work has begun on both IPad apps and teacher packs for our books! Both are scheduled for release at the end of 2011, and we’re so excited to be starting into this new venture.
Here is one very common interaction that occurs between engineers and “normal people” that happens after the engineer creates something. It goes the same every time. The normal person says “Why would you do this?” or “What’s the point?”. The engineer will then proudly and promptly respond with “Because I can!” or “It’s just awesome!”. This may very well be one of those cases, but it still caused a bunch of university students to look like 6 year olds who got new shiny red bikes.
Today, we were playing with the GROP, and managed to get it working in real time being controlled remotely by the accelerometers of an iPod touch. It managed to mesmerize us for a short period of time, but then made us wonder what else we can do with this concept. That will come later, but for now, enjoy the lovely sights and sounds of our robotic contraption!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXH4pAGXbzE
We used an app on the iPod touch that sent the accelerometer data through a UDP port on our local network, and then we wrote a program in LabVIEW that grabbed the data from the port. We used some code samples from forums, which really helped with the accelerometer data parsing from the port. This data was then sent to the motors, and we also wrote some custom code to keep the horizontal motors synchronized.
Well, I might as well start by introducing myself. I’m Aaron, and today was my first day working here at ETC. It was mostly a training day, just to get acquainted with everyone and everything here at Enable. Well, I will say this. It seems very relaxed here, but at the same time, almost too relaxed. I can imagine it’s much like the feeling Hansel and Gretel had when they were being fattened up to be eaten (but hopefully that’s not the case!).
I spent most of the day getting acquainted with the job, with the help of the coop student whom I am replacing, Ayman. She was VERY helpful, gave me probably the most in-depth orientation I could ask for, and it seems like I’d be able to pick up where she left off with ease. There are very detailed instructions, and I know exactly where to start and how to proceed. Hopefully this trend continues.
At the moment, I’ve fully set up all my contact information and various email address to get connected with the ETC crew. I just thought that this blog post would be a fun way to start my actual work here at ETC.
All in all, it’s been a great start to what promises to be a great coop term. Looking forward to where this takes me.
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