Idol Star Astronomer Notes

chipKIT Uno32 Testing of Total Control Lighting Library

I tested the total control lighting library with the chipKIT Uno32 Arduino compatible PIC based microcontroller. Their IDE is a bit behind the Arduino version, so I would recommend using the 1.0 version of the library: arduino-TCL-1.0.zip. One difference in installation is that the library has to be unzipped into the mpdie/Java/hardware/pic32/libraries directory or it will not be recognized.

Paint by Pixels

It’s time for a couple of software announcements:

1. A new version of the Total Control Lighting Arduino library is now available (version 1.2). It includes support for the forthcoming Total Control Lighting Developer Shield (see the README for details), a new color designer example, which lets you dial in exactly the color you want on the LEDs and then find the right RGB combination with the click of a button, and a serial control sketch which allows you to control the lights via USB connection through the Arduino from the computer, but why did I add this?
2. PixelPaint, my new software for designing animations on Total Control Lighting pixels is ready for download. The software lets you control the lights directly from a computer, or load a sequence into the Arduino that can run without a computer. You can see a video of some of the early development (Note that it now does connect in real time to the Arduino).

Both software packages are open source. Now go have fun!

Dear Students

Dear Students,

I am writing to those of you who have signed up for my classes in Spring 2012 and those who remain on the waitlists for those classes because as you heave heard registration is closing on December 19th. You have also been told that registration may not reopen again in the spring semester. Hopefully you have also heard that the legislature is cutting an additional $100 million from the CSU budget, in addition to the $650 million it already cut at the beginning of the year. This amounts to a 27% cut in the state funding of the California State University system in one year, and brings us back to funding levels of over a decade ago.

I know you have been dealing with rapid tuition increases and the effect of reduced staffing in many departments. How is it that you are paying more and getting less? Unfortunately the tuition increases do not cover the severe reductions in state funding, so despite paying more you really are getting less. The faculty and staff at CSU Stanislaus have done their best to mitigate the reduction, but we are at levels that are not sustainable, and more and more you are seeing the effects of this severe budget reduction. The most recent effect is the sudden and unprecedented suspension of enrollment.

I am hopeful that I will be able to add students from the waitlists at the beginning of the Spring semester. Our current policy on class registration states that “the addition of students following the beginning of instruction shall be at the discretion of the instructor by the use of permission numbers, or their equivalent.” At this time I cannot add you to the class you are requesting as it is full, but I am saving a copy of the waitlist (as I have also heard the rumors that they will disappear) and hope to begin handing out permission numbers based on the current waitlist in the Spring. I am hopeful that I will be able to accommodate all those students who attend the first two classes in the spring, though I have never seen a situation like this. I will fight to try to add students if there is any space in my classes, though I am not sure that I will be successful.

In the mean time, I urge you, whether you are on the waitlist or in the class, to contact your state legislator by phone, email, or letter (find your legislator here) and let them know how this budget reduction is effecting you. I also urge you to contact Governor Jerry Brown and let him know as well. If you would like to maintain an affordable higher education system for California, now is the time to fight for it.

Sincerely,

Christopher De Vries

The California State University Budget Crisis

California cut the California State University budget by another 100 million dollars mid-year, which makes the total budget cut for this fiscal year $750 million or a 27% reduction over last year. This brings the budget for the 23 campus system down to 1997-1998 levels (in non-inflation adjusted dollars) even though we currently serve 90,000 more students than we did at that time.

What is the effect of this? On the Stanislaus campus we are suspending enrollment on the 19th, and it may not reopen. We are cutting low-enrollment classes and will likely do away with entire academic programs. Students are struggling to find courses to fill requirements, often graduating a year or more later than anticipated due to lack of classes. Some department offices in the college of natural science are only open part-time because we don’t have the staff to keep them open all the time. 

Salaries for faculty and staff have stagnated. As a tenured professor I make less than postdoctoral fellows at my previous place of employment. Administrative assistants start with salaries that qualify them for food stamps (if they are the sole wage earner for a family of 3). The benefits our state has offered have been very good, but they are currently under attack as being overly generous and are likely to be reduced as well. 

The demands on our students have been immense. 20 years ago a student could reasonably work full time over the summer and earn enough money to pay tuition, fees, and for textbooks and have enough left over to live frugally over the year. These days a student probably cannot earn enough money from a summer job to cover tuition, fees, and pay for textbooks, not to mention save money to live off of during the semester, so our students have the choice of taking jobs during the academic year, taking out loans, or doing both. Many do both, and end up working 20 or 30 hours a week (some even more) and their work suffers, their degree progress slows, and they become less likely to graduate (if they do graduate they do it later).

If you’re not at the CSU, why should you care? The CSU serves a lot of California citizens. Citizens who are likely to stay in California. Access to a bachelor’s degree means access to higher earning power, which means more tax revenues for the state, which means a faster recovery from this crisis. Higher education is not a burden for this state. It’s an investment. Every dollar invested in the CSU returns $5 to the California economy. Unfortunately it seems like an investment the state is unwilling to make.

We have cut to the bone in our college. There is no fat to trim. I do not know how we will deal with this additional cut.

Arduino Total Control Lighting Update

I recently found out that the total control lighting arduino library was not working with the new arduino IDE (version 1.0). I looking into it, found, and fixed the problem. The new arduino tcl library is now available for download. The code can of course be obtained from bitbucket or from github. This version fixes the problem with a change in the names of arduino header files and also changes the extension for the example sketched from “.pde” to “.ino” with is the new filename standard.

Hack away total control lighting artists! 

Computational Simulation

Next semester I’ll be doing a new course in computational simulation. I’m looking forward to the course and hope believe that it will be extremely useful for our physics majors who rarely do any programming. I am a bit apprehensive that it might mean a very heavy workload for me next semester as I will also have a new General Education course in solar and alternative energy as well as be teaching descriptive astronomy and contemporary astronomy. 

If you would like to check out my course, please follow my course web page. I wanted to dive a bit into mechanics in this post.

Software

I’ve decided to use python in my course as it has a relatively shallow learning curve and includes a very robust set of tools in SciPy and NumPy. I am pointing my students to the Enthought Python Distribution which bundles the libraries they need together for Mac OS X and Windows. Their free academic version should make installing a working python distribution and libraries fairly easy. I have also suggested the students use Wingware’s Wing IDE 101 which is also available for free academic use. I am less familiar with Wing, but my research students found it more intuitive than other text editors.

I decided that part of any computational class should be instilling good practices for coding and for research, so I am also introducing them to distributed revision control in the form of mercurial. I considered introducing them to git, but I find mercurial a bit more intuitive to use and understand. I use mercurial as my main revision control system, so it’s also not a steep learning curve for me.

I will be requiring them to submit reports with their laboratory write-ups. I considered letting them use whatever WYSIWYG systems they currently use, but I would prefer that the files they work on be text based and included in the mercurial revision control easily. I thought about requiring LaTeX, but that seemed like a steep learning curve for a one semester class that will also include python programming, so I decided to meet them half-way and use LyX for write-ups. LyX files are plain text, but they include a WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) editor which should be more intuitive for the students.

Finally I decided to include Gnu Make as a topic and program in my course. I know Make is a bit old and there are several build systems which might be more modern, but Make is very adaptable. I want to get the students automating the production of simulations and the comparison of those simulations with data. Make will be especially important as a tool for them in one of the later competition based assignments where they will be given a new data set and be required to produce a simulation based on that data in class.

Paperless

Since this is a computational class, I am going to try to be paperless. I will be assigning homework through the wiki and a mercurial repository will be serving them code stubs and instructions. They will turn in assignments as a mercurial bundle which will be delivered directly to my Dropbox using FileStork.

I was going to modify each repository with comments and a grade, but I haven’t figure out how I will return it. Probably via email as the comments are not likely to create a very large changeset. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

Resolution in Support of Peaceable Assembly

In the weekend before Thanksgiving, I managed to draft a resolution and get our academic senate to hold a special meeting to pass a resolution condemning the police crackdown on UC students at Berkeley and Davis and in support of peaceful assembly. The resolution itself is below.

29/AS/11//SEC - Resolution in Support of UC Students and Faculty Right to Peaceably Assemble

Arduino total control lighting library on github

I love mercurial for version control. I find it intuitive to use and simpler to integrate into my workflow than git. I also love that bitbucket allows me unlimited private repositories as well as public repositories. Bitbucket has become the place where I keep my code backups, both private and public. However github is a vibrant commons for programmers, so to go where the action is, I am placing a mirror of my source code for the arduino-tcl library on github. 

Thankfully the hg-git plugin to mercurial makes this easy. I can continue to use mercurial for version control and can participate in the git based ecosystem that is github. To push my repository to github I modified my .hg/hgrc file to include the line

github = git+ssh://git@github.com/devries/arduino-tcl.git

I then had to bookmark the default branch revision as master (which was mentioned in the hg-git documentation).

hg bookmark -r default master

Then I could push to the new repository using the command:

hg push github

So now everyone in the github community can access and fork the arduino-tcl library and make it better.