Bright ideas

One qualitity that I'm constantly seeing in other engineers is their ability to continually come up with new and interesting ideas for various projects - I guess I'm not an exception to the rule then.
One idea was prompted by my recent week spent over at beach mission. Basically there is one gave were we have to try and determine the relative sound intensity of the children. We could manage to do this by ear - but it could be heaps cooler building a gadget to do so. So project 1 is a simple sound level metre. It would use a small electret mic condenser which is sampled by a microcontroller every 10ms or so. An array of LEDs could then be used to display a moving average of the sound level - say every 250 to 500ms. A button could also be included to allow the maximum sound intensity for a period to be displayed.

The second project can be found here: It is a centrifugal based BB launcher. Since I'm currently waiting on parts for both the coil launcher and air controlled launcher - this could be interesting in the mean time.

Work + Websites

I just started my new job as an electronic hardware design engineer mid-December. It' s rather unusual still not being considered a student - rather an engineer - the real thing. Cool and wonderful. At the moment I'm learning Perl - which looks really useful for scripting - and something else I can add to my business card - yippee.
I'm currently toying with two interesting projects - they are really different approaches to the same project - a computer controlled coil gun and a computer controlled air gun. Both are quite harmless with an effective range in the order of a few meters. I'm looking at probably a serial connection which will interface with a microcontroller to control some servos providing x and y directional capabilities. At least one of these is on my to-do list for 2007. I'm also looking at using a similar remote controlled servo step at church to remotely control a video camera from the AV-Desk.
The final piece of news I have is that now I have my own domain name. www.rross.com.au
This site incorporates both a technical and a faith aspect to it - both are under heavy development.