Dale Peterson

I recently did a lecture in a mechanical vibrations course on mode shapes and modal decomposition. I made a handout for the material to summarize the main ideas.

I pleaded not guilty to a bicycle stop sign violation in Yolo county today. The judge found there to be reasonable doubt, and I was found not guilty.

I was cited for failure to stop at the stop sign while headed eastbound at the intersection of East 8th street and J street, Davis, CA. . . . → Read More: Success in court

I noticed that the editors/publshers of the revised Feynman Lectures on Physics posted a challenge problem, so I decided to work out a solution. In doing so, I took the time to learn TikZ. The result was a pretty nice (I think) drawing of the pendulum system described in that problem. My solution is . . . → Read More: Feynman Lectures Exercise Challenge

About 2 months ago on a Saturday evening, I was working on my bike and cut the middle joint of my index finger. The cut was deep enough, and the hacksaw was dirty enough, that I knew that I needed get it looked by a doctor. I looked up my health benefits on my . . . → Read More: The price of a single stitch

Today I was helping some undergraduates in a mechanical vibrations course to use ode45. The way you specify the right hand side of the ode’s must fit Matlab’s particular form (using an @ before the function name, which must be contained in a file of the same name, with a ‘.m’ extension). Looking at . . . → Read More: Matlab function syntax is abysmal

I’ve been using \(\LaTeX\) for about 7 years now, and have always been impressed with its ability to make math and text look amazing. Obviously, a serious shortfall of the web has been to be able to incorporate math directly into web pages. There have been lots of approaches, but most of them have . . . → Read More: MathJax test

My robotic bike has several 5.0V devices (encoders and motor controllers, and a 5.0V Arduino Mega), as well as several 3.3V logic level devices (Vector Nav VN-100 IMU, SST SPI Flash).  For high speed voltage level conversion, I found these products from Maxim-IC:

http://www.maxim-ic.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/3672

They will convert from 1.2V to 5.5V, or 5.5V to . . . → Read More: High speed voltage level translators

My VPS host just upgraded their servers to Ubuntu 10.04, so I just spent today saving all my old stuff, wiping my VPS, and reinstalling everything.  I was using nginx as my webserver previously, but now I’m using lighttpd, and it was pretty easy to setup.  I’m still ironing out the bugs, but I . . . → Read More: New VPS