This is my first blog post for 'Unconventional Wisdom'.  I'm going to treat this blogger as a diary of sorts and something to express my ideas quickly down on paper.  The writing will feature updates on my electronic and software hobby projects.  I also intend to sketch out writings which will be published in a more formal manner at another time.  I'm not really sure why I chose to name the blog 'Unconventional Wisdom' ... other than the fact that I enjoy advice that goes against the grain and isn't steeped in lore.  I hate operating on anecdotal evidence, it's lazy, and I respect reason.

So what's up right now?

1. Graduate Thesis
Well, I'm finishing my graduate thesis work right now for my MSEE at University of California, Davis.  I'm in the process of characterizing the noise of my photodiode front-end.  My goal is to make a comparisson between a conventional transimpedance amplifier and integrator for making light measurements.  I've had good progress so far in characterizing thermal, shot, and amplifier noise of my OPA124 operational amplifier.  I've made measurements on a HP 3561 Dynamic Signal Analyzer.  The spectrum analyzer provides a magnitude frequency response between 0.000125 Hz and 100 kHz.  It's a great instrument, the datasheet can be found here:
http://www.accusrc.com/objects/catalog/product/extras/5350_3561a.pdf

I'm capturing the magnitude response over a USB-GPIB interface to my laptop.  An example of my shot noise measurements are shown below.  The photocurrent results in a shot noise current that increases the noise floor.  I measured a DC photocurrent of 71.3 nA, 729.7 nA, and 2.7 uA and compared theory to measured results.  The results matched up well and are as follows:

Shot Theory
 -109.4209

 -103.1324

  -97.9616

Shot Measured
 -109.5040

 -103.2240

  -98.2600

2. Personal Projects
I ordered some cool stuff from sparkfun this past week.  One of the items I played with is the Sparkfun LiPo Fuel Gauge.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10617

It's a module that has a Maxim MAX1704 chip for monitoring the charge of lithium polymer rechargeable batteries.

One of the Sparkfun engineers provided an Arduino sketch using I2C Wire to communicate with the chip and extract battery percentage and voltage.  I ported this code to the PSoC Creator environment on Sunday and tested using the CY8CKIT-001 with a PSoC3 module.  A picture of the setup with the output on a LCD screen is shown below:

I uploaded the example on my website and the file can be downloaded from this link.