Central Georgia IEEE Section 2007 Meeting History
Rick Noel's report of the 2007 SoutheastCon Meeting.
Mercer PDR/CDR Schedule
We are not just for electrial and electronic engineers.
November 2007 Meeting Dennis Ludwig presented information on Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) on Tuesday, the 13th of November (the day before his 53rd birthday).
IPv6 (138 bits) will replace IPv4 (32 bits). The transition process has already started. This presentation was an
overview of IPv6, its advantages and disadvantages. Dennis discussed what it will take for your organization to
implement the protocol. Dennis is a former member of IEEE Central Georgia Section and now resides in OH. Dennis has
degrees from Louisiana Tech, Georgia College , and Mercer. We met at Ball Aerospace at 128 Osigian Drive in
Warner Robins GA.
The post meeting dinner was at Jalisco's Grill Mexican Restaurant in the Kroger shopping center.
October 2007 Meeting The 16th of October meeting was a tour of the Scherer Electric Generating Plant. This facility is located north of Macon
just 12 miles up Riverside drive from I-75, Scherer is the largest coal
generating site in the USA. Four units generate close to 900 megawatts
each for a total of 3600 megawatts. The power is transmitted at 500,000
volts to the Georgia Power transmission grid. Thanks to Adam Woodson for the tour. We had 23 folks to attend the meeting. The post-meeting meeting was at Logan's Roadhouse.
Thanks for former chair Curtis Lee for setting up this meeting.
September 2007 Meeting The September meeting was on Software Assurance by John Mathieson. Mr Mathieson is an engineer at Robins Air Force Base
present a lecture on Software Assurance. In short, it's a way to
verify the integrity of electronic data and make sure it hasn't had any
unauthorized modifications. It's an easy process that anyone can make use of to
enhance the security and configuration management of electronic data. The
algorithms discussed are the same ones used in digital signatures and encryption.
A demonstration of some of the sofware tools used in this business was
beshown.
This presentation was at the Ball Aerospace conference room on September the
18th at the Ball Aerospace National Defense Solutions facility in Warner Robins GA.
Afterward, we had dinner at El Jalise's Mexican Restuarant.
Thanks to chair Rick Noel for setting up this meeting.
June 2007 Meeting Dennis Glover spoke on Tuesday, the 26th of June. Dennis talked about Tesla Coils,
AC and DC motors,
and Westinghouse. We met at Ball Aerospace at 128 Osigian Drive in Warner Robins.
Thanks to Chair Rick Noel for scheduling this meeting.
May 2007 Meeting The May meeting was a Kalman Filter tutorial focused on the use of optimization theory
for better measurements of the period of a simple pendulum. Randall D. Peters, PhD, Professor and
Chairman of the Mercer University Physics Department presented the tutorial. The synopsis is:
The assumption that a pendulum is isochronous (having a period
independent of amplitude) is reasonable only at small amplitudes of the
motion. With a goal of parts-per-million precision, low-level motions
are a great challenge for any sensor used to measure the period,
because of the small SNR with which it must operate. Improvements in SNR are
realized by increasing the amplitude; however, one must then address
the secular change (gradual reduction in the period) that occurs during the
course of data collection involving free decay of the pendulum. The
math-foundation of optimal filtering (Kalman algorithm) is built around
time dependent variances. Thus it is well suited to the pendulum, once
the theoretical features of nonlinearity get factored into the problem.
The solution that will be described was published in Applied
Mathematics and Computation (28:179-190, 1988). The estimation process assumes (i)
quadratic dependence of period on amplitude and (ii) exponential decay
from an initial displacement of about 5 degrees. It was used to
measure the period of a well-made pendulum to better than 2 ppm in a data
collection interval of less than 4 minutes.
We met at Ball Aerospace in Warner Robins GA on Thursday, the 31st of May at 6:30 PM for Dr Peters' presentation.
After the meeting, we had dinner at Jalise's Mexican Restuarant.
Thanks to Rick Noel for setting up this meeting.
April 2007 Meeting The April meeting was a review of the Mercer University robot entry in the SoutheastCon
(which will be in Richmond VA). The meeting was Monday the 23rd of April at 6:30 PM in the Mercer University Engineering building,
Room 210 at the Macon GA campus.
The IEEE hosts the Southeastern Conference (SoutheastCon), annually.
Students from around the country are invited to compete in the Student Hardware Competition,
which is a robotics competition that demonstrates the student’s engineering capabilities.
This year’s conference, entitled “Engineering- Linking the Future with the Past,” involves
a modified version of basketball. An autonomous robot must launch table tennis balls at a ten inch
diameter hoop, receive and display an infrared code from the ball request zone, traverse to the
rebound zone, and sound a buzzer to receive a new payload of table tennis balls.
The game will consist of twenty-seven table tennis balls which will be disbursed in payloads of
three balls when the robot has displayed the correct code and has sounded a buzzer to signify it is
ready for a new payload. Once all twenty-seven balls have been played, the winner will be decided by
the highest number of points.
The Robotics team from Mercer, which was composed of one computer engineer and three electrical engineers,
gave a PowerPoint based presentation and demonstration of the robot they built and entered in SoutheastCon. This presentation will take place Monday, April 23rd at 6:30pm in Mercer’s Engineering
School Room 210. Here is information about the Mercer robot team.
Dr Clayton Paul was advisor to the team, which finished fourth in competition with 31 other engineering schools.
Thanks to Ginger Rahn for setting up this meeting.
Mercer University Student Chapter IEEE MEETING The meeting was on Friday, March 30, 2007, at 10 AM in EGC 225B at Macon's Mercer Univesity Campus.
This meeting was to introduce the new Mercer IEEE Officers.
There were free Doughnuts for those who attended. (You did not have to be a member to attend). Curtis Lee attended from the
Central Georgia Section.
Mercer University IEEE officers
Chair - Daniel Eidson
Vice-Chair - Brooks Lindsey
Treasurer - Blake Franklin
Secretary - Matt Risser
March 2007 Meeting We had a joint meeting in conjunction with the Old Crows symposium in Warner Robins.
We attended the electronic warfare exhibits on Tuesday, the 20th of March at the
Robins AFB Museum of Aviation. Tracy Tillman got us in to the symposium. The Dixie Crows are
at Dixie Crows.
Thanks to Mr Tillman for including us in their sysmposium
Another February 2007 Meeting Our Executive Committee (EXCOMM) Meeting was in Macon GA on Thursday, the 22nd of February.
Our new Chair, Rick Noel, conducted the meeting. We discussed the upcoming year and possible meetings. In attendance were club officers (newly selected), Vice-Chair Clif Menchew (recently promoted),
Secretary Suraj Padmanbhan, and Treasurer Lew Mozzini, and Director Adam Wofford. Also attending were past Chair Curtis Lee (and his wife Laura)
, Webmaster Dan Bishop, and Mercer University student chapter member Ginger Rahn.
Thanks for Curtis Lee and Rick Noel for setting up this meeting.
February 2007 Meeting The IEEE was invited to the Mercer Physics Department Seminar, a Journal Club meeting. John Lee
led discussion on the following article:
"The Early Days of Precision Laser Spectroscopy,"by Richard G. Brewer, Aram Mooradian, and Boris P. Stoicheff,
Physics Today (Jan 2007).
The meeting was on Wednesday, February 7th, 4:30pm at the Willet Science Center (Room 101)
at the Macon Mercer University camputs.
Abstract: “In the 1960s and 1970s, spectroscopists developed a host of nonlinear techniques to
measure the interaction of light and matter with a resolution fine enough to test quantum
electrodynamics and optically detect weak interactions in atoms.”
This article is available online only to Physics Today subscribers, but there will be copies at the
session. For a complete listing of Mercer Physics Dept Seminar events see
https://physics.mercer.edu/seminars
Light refreshments were served at 4:15 ouside WSC 109.
Thanks to Curtis Lee for getting us invited.
January 2007 Meeting Our first IEEE meeting for 2007 was at Ball Aerospace in Warner Robins on Thursday, the 25th of January.
A video presentation on the development and engineering leading up to the creation of the dual Deep Impact spacecraft
was presented. Deep Impact was a first ever, dual NASA space probe mission to impact, and image the impact, of comet
Tempel 1. Many have compared it to “…hitting a speeding bullet, with a bullet, while photographing the results from another
bullet.” The purpose of the mission was to gather data on the internal composition of comet Tempel 1.
Both spacecraft were launched on the same rocket on 12 Jan 2005 (there was a 5 second launch window to meet the
comet rendezvous criteria). Comet Tempel 1 was successfully impacted by the impactor space probe on 4 July 2005,
while the impact collision was imaged by the fly-by space probe. The impact energy was equivalent to 4.5 tons of TNT
and created a crater believed to be up to 100 meters wide (larger than the bowl of the Roman Colosseum). The fly-by
spacecraft successfully imaged the collision, downloaded all of the data, survived the debris field, and has been
etargeted by NASA on July 20, 2005 to image the comet Boethin.
Ball Aerospace is located at 128 Osigian Boulevard in Warner Robins.
Afterwards, we had dinner at Cheddars restuarant.
Thanks to Rick Noel for setting up this meeting.
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