IEEE

2010 IEEE Board Applications

Greg — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:45:52 +0000

IEEE Board applications are now open for 2010! Seven current board members are graduating which means we need capable people to continue driving IEEE to excellence. More information about how to apply and lead the largest ECE society on campus is available here. For any questions on a position and its responsibilities, or general queries feel free to contact any of the current board members.

Update

2010 IEEE Board Application deadline has been extended to Wednesday November 25.

Barcrawls and meetings and workshops! Oh my!

Donald — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:43:04 +0000

IEEE is pleased to announce its second General Meeting of the semester, to be held on Wednesday October 28, from 6-8PM. Everyone is encouraged to come out and see what IEEE has been busy with, and what we still have left to offer this semester! Food and drinks will be provided.

After the General Meeting, everyone over the age of 19 is invited to join us for the bi-annual IEEE/HKN Barcrawl (however, you still need to be 21 years or older to drink). Sign-ups are open NOW. Either stop by the IEEE office and put your name on our form, or fill out our online sign-up form over on the right by October 21 to secure a shirt in your size. The barcrawl schedule will be:

9PM – 10PM: Legends
10PM – 11PM: Murphys
11PM – midnight: Clybourne
midnight – 2AM: Brothers

Come on out for a night of fun with your fellow engineers.

IEEE also has two workshops to announce. To wrap up this semester, IEEE will be building snap-o-lanterns, as well as bringing back an old favorite, the speaker-building workshop.

The snap-o-lantern will be held on Halloween (October 31 for those who didn’t know). It is a very simple workshop, and you get to make a cool Halloween decoration, as well as polish your soldering skills and learn how servos work with microcontrollers. It is also a short workshop, and I do not expect people to need more than an hour to go from start to finish.

Where: 241 Everitt Lab
When: October 31, 11AM – 1PM
Price: $10 for IEEE members, $15 for non-members, $1 for batteries
Why: Show off your new Halloween decoration to all your friends.

And now, the return of an old favorite, the speaker-building workshop. We will be building the Dayton BR-1 speaker kit, provided by Parts-Express.com. This is an amazing set of bookshelf speakers, and a welcome addition to anyone’s home theater setup. Though their price is a mere $130 for IEEE members (and $160 for non-members), these speakers are readily compared against speakers that sell for over double the price of these Dayton BR-1’s, and this set still comes out on top. If you notice, this workshop will also recoup the entire cost of a 2009 IEEE membership in its member discount.
The workshop will be held November 14, from noon until 5PM. Some soldering skills are required. Amplifier not included. Sign-ups are online NOW, and will close on November 4, to allow for shipping times.

Where: 241 Everitt Lab
When: November 14, noon – 5PM
Price: $130 for IEEE members, $160 for non-members
Why: You get to build a great sounding set of speakers, and learn about speaker-building theory along the way.

IEEE Workshop: LED Cube

Donald — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:44:31 +0000

The workshop is officially full, however, you should contact Don Ziems at dziems@ieee.org if you are still interested in this workshop.

IEEE Workshop’s third event has been chosen, an LED Cube workshop!

Everyone is invited to come and build a 3×3x3 LED Cube. What is an LED cube you ask? It is a set of 27 LEDs, arranged in a 3D mesh to form a cube shape. The cubes we will be making will be based off of this internet project: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/09/make_a_pocket_led_cube_we.html. Available colors will be blue and orange.

This event will be located in 241 Everitt on October 17 from 12:05PM until 3PM. Cost will be $10 for IEEE members, and $15 for non-IEEE members. Good soldering skills are highly recommended.

We will have a cool blinking pattern installed into the cube by default, but if you decide to change it, you will need a computer (operating system does not matter) with a serial port, or a USB to serial converter, as well as some C programming knowledge.

IEEE Soldering Workshop

Donald — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:27:24 +0000

Hello everyone. Its now time for IEEE to host its second workshop of the semester. This time, we will be focusing on teaching attendees soldering skills. Anyone who attends will have their choice of two introductory soldering projects.

The first is an easy to construct european-style siren and LED flasher circuit. This one makes for a great introductory project, and comes complete with a soldering iron and solder for you to take home. We only have 10 of the siren kits, so I ask that you sign up on the side if you are interested.

The second project is a DIY logic probe. Where the siren is a fun circuit to build, the logic probe is extremely practical, being highly useful for debugging circuits in classes such as ECE 110 and ECE 385. The logic probe allows you to analyze in a very plain and obvious way what is currently happening in your circuit, without having to drag a full-sized multimeter or oscilloscope around with you. Soldering set not included, but can be bought separately. We have a surplus of logic probe kits, so no sign-up needed.

The workshop will be held in 241 Everitt on Saturday, October 3 from 12 noon until 3PM, though most attendees, even first time solderers, typically finish in under an hour and a half.

Costs for the workshop are:

Siren Kit

$10 for IEEE members
$15 for non-members

Logic Probe Kit

$5 for IEEE members
$10 for non-members
$5 for soldering set

note: If you choose to, you may purchase both kits, but in the interest of keeping the workshop at a reasonable length, we ask that you only construct one during the workshop time, and save the other for practice at home.

JSDC Informational Meeting

Greg — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:14:50 +0000

When:9 PM Thursday September 24th
Where: 242 Everitt Lab
Interested in joining the team to design the robot for this year’s Jerry Sanders Design Competition? Come to the JSDC Informational Meeting this Thursday at 9 PM in the IEEE lab to know the details of the competition.

SPAC this Saturday!

Mike — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:04:36 +0000

The second annual SPAC (Student Professional Awareness Conference) will be held this Saturday beginning at noon! Hear presentations from two professors as well as an IEEE-USA speaker. Prof. Lynford Goddard will be talking about his research in Optoelectronics, Prof. John Rogers will be talking about his research in Stretchable Electronics, and Daniel Biank (of IEEE-USA) will be talking about how to mix passions with work in his speech entitled “Balancing Work with Life.”

SPAC will be held in the Plym Auditorium of Temple Hoyne Buell Hall (room 0134), located near the Education Building.

Visit our website for more information and to register! http://ieee.ec.illinois.edu/spac09

Second Annual SPAC!

Mike — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:02:33 +0000

The second annual Student Professional Awareness Conference is coming up on September 26! This year we will again have three speakers – Prof. Lynford Goddard, Prof. John Rogers, and Daniel Biank (from IEEE national branch). There will also be an informal panel discussion following the presentations.

If you’re interested in learning about your own future, then please visit the SPAC website at http://ieee.ec.illinois.edu/spac09 for more information and to register. We hope to see you there!

SPAC is free to attend, but please register on the website beforehand!

Questions? Email spac.ieee@gmail.com

IEEE Microcontroller Course

Donald — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:23:52 +0000

UPDATE: As of 1AM on September 15, the course is officially full. e-mail me at dziems@ieee.org if you are interested, and you will be put on a waiting list in the event someone changes their mind. IEEE is proud to announce that this semester, we will be offering a 12-hour course as an Introduction to AVR Microcontrollers. This course will begin the first week in October and end just before fall break (time and place to be determined, though Friday evenings 5-6:30 somewhere in Everitt are most likely). That represents 8 weekly meetings, and 90 minutes per meeting.

The course syllabus can be found here in PDF form. If you read the syllabus, you will see that this course is not intended to be rigorous and in-depth, but rather a gentle introduction into the world of microcontrollers. There will be no required homework, and only minimal time requirements outside of class (if any).

This course is open to ALL students. However, a background in C is strongly encouraged to gain the most out of this course, as all coding will be done in C. If you do not know C, but still want to take this course, I strongly recommend learning on your own time. It is not a particularly hard language to learn, and you do not need to be a C guru to understand this course; knowledge of how variables, functions, and mathematical operators work, as well as proper syntax, should be sufficient.

I strongly encourage participants to bring their own laptop. Any OS will work, but Atmel only provides its software development suite for Windows, so Mac and Linux users will need to use open-source command-line programs.

The cost will be $65 for IEEE members, and $75 for non-IEEE members. This gets you an I/O board with a variety of sensors and displays, as well as a USB microcontroller programmer and two AVR microcontrollers. All items are yours to keep after the course is done, though if you decide you do not want the I/O board, and it is in good working condition, we will buy it back from you for $20

~~Sign-ups are open now.~~ Sign-ups are closed Class size is limited to 20 students, so if you are interested, please sign up as soon as possible. Since we need to order materials, sign-ups will only be open until September 18th. Also, we are requiring people to pay for the course in full by September 18.
If you are on the sign-up list, but have not paid by September 18th, your name will be removed. We will order a few extra materials in the event something is defective, but a seat in the course will not be guaranteed.

IEEE General Meeting #1 and Workshop

Donald — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:29:07 +0000

IEEE is going to be having its first general meeting of the semester on Wednesday, September 2 from 5-7PM in 151 Everitt Lab. Everyone is invited to come to see what IEEE has planned for this semester, and to get involved with our various committees. FREE PIZZA.

Also, on Tuesday, September 1 from 7-8:30 PM in DCL L440, IEEE will be hosting a free workshop on test driven development, presented by Doug Bradbury and Micah Martin of 8th Light, Inc. Test Driven Development is a software development practice where test are written first, then production code is written. Learning this technique will quickly help you write better code faster and with fewer bugs. Kiss you debugger goodbye! The workshop will be presented in C, but the idea is applicable to any language.
No sign-ups are needed, but space is limited, so please try to arrive early to ensure you get a seat.

The Spark

Mahir — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:27:34 +0000

The Spark is a magazine which talks about on campus student led projects from all disciplines of engineering.

We plan to post it online to gain a wider audience. My committee is currently working on putting the articles together and getting our layout and title page set. We currently have articles from IEEE Seeds and ACM Sigs. We are also expecting to receive articles from BMES and UMO.

I would also like to thank our sponsors–Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Infinera Corporation–for their generous donations to help get our project started.

I am currently looking for more articles and ideas to include in the magazine. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Mahir Gosalia (mgosal2@illinois.edu)