Class!

Contrary to prior belief, I have done more than run around Europe with a camera since arriving in Berlin. Last week, we began to lab portion of our program, which will continue on through this week and conclude next week with presentations of our findings.

But let me back up to the very beginning (because I don't remember what all I talked about before, haha). Our first two weeks here in Berlin were dedicated to a crash course in the German language (and traveling, of course). Obviously it's impossible to even get a beginner's grasp on a language in two weeks, but we managed to learn a lot. We covered all survival words that we might need, and spent a good amount of time on food so we could both order food and grocery shop without playing the food equivalent of Russian roulette (believe me, before the lessons, I made some less than tasty mistakes). The lessons were very informative over all, and while I may not be much of a German speaker, I am a decent German listener, and I can pick up on what people are trying to tell me most of the time. Truth be told, Berlin isn't much of a place to learn German. Everyone here speaks English, so when the going gets rough, the German speak my tongue, haha. With or without forced practice though, I've come a long way in learning German.

Last week, the third week of our program, marked the start of our lab sessions, as I mentioned before. Specifically, there are three different lab sections that the 16 of us in the program are divided more or less evenly across. For one, there is an automotive lab which is based around the construction and tuning of a motor, as well as the implementation of a turbocharger (if I've heard correctly). The second lab revolves around energy and efficiency. While I'm not sure what the big goal is for that project, I know that they have done a lot of work with energy and mass transfer diagrams, and are currently testing different energy production methods and collecting data. I myself am in the third group, microcontrollers. Our task is an extremely specific one: construct and program a sensor that can take a picture, store it to an SD card, and then use advanced filtering techniques to greatly reduce the size of an image so it can be easily compressed and transferred from computer to computer, all with an extremely limited amount of processing space. If that sounds like a long and complex problem, that's because it is, haha.

While it is only the second week of lab, we have already made a lot of progress towards our goal. Every member of our 5 person group was tasked with constructing a complete microcontroller from only a bare proto-board and separate capacitors, resistors, voltage converters, etc. I myself had never soldered before, so I had some serious doubts about my ability to construct an entire sensor from parts, but I actually did quite well. In fact, every member of my group managed to create a complete and working board, which was pretty impressive. After making the boards, we were able to test them using a series of programs that our student instructor had created and confirm that they were working properly and were capable of completing our main task. Today we started approaching the picture filter and transformation process, which is and will probably continue to be extremely difficult to wrap my mind around. Fortunately though, Stephan is extremely helpful, and is encouraging us as much as possible to find our own solutions to the problem.

It's cool to know that our work is going to be helping this project in the long run. While Stephan has already created a program that completes the goal laid out for us, he believes that it can be improved to take up even less space and to run even more quickly. On the very brightest side, one of us will uncover a method that is more efficient than his own, really pushing the project forward. Worst case scenario though, we solve the problem in less efficient ways, but our approaches and thoughts might inspire further research that could create more efficient programs. Basically, there's room for optimism even in failure here, because our screw-ups could unknowingly be the cornerstones for better methods. I'll stay optimistic, haha.

As time continues, I'll try to keep you posted on the progress of my team as well as the other two project teams. Hopefully we'll have some cool stuff to show for our work!

Oh, and sorry for the entirely pictureless post. Pictures of class work exist, just tragically not on my camera. If I can get a hold of a few I'll try to throw them onto this post later. Until then, thanks for tuning in, and I'll talk to you soon!