« Laptop Guts Make Great Picture Frames | Home | NIT + CBI = LAME »
Education Goes Full Circle
By Jonathan | March 18, 2008 at 8:52 pm
In the fall of 2001 during my first ever college lab at UC, we played with LEGOS. That’s right, LEGOS. The lab was Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the LEGOS were actually robots…sort of. In 1998 LEGO introduced a programmable LEGO brick known as the LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX (or something close to that). Using a relatively simple GUI, we were able to create somewhat complex programs that controlled motors and read sensors connected to the RCX. As freshmen our mission was to build a robot with the RCX that would perform specific tasks on a course, such as following lines or picking up a ball and depositing it in another location. This of course taught us good design principles, good implementation methods, and – well, never mind.
Who would have thought that 6.5 years later [as I perform research for my Master’s Thesis] I would be playing with LEGOS again? I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
So before you think I’m just going to build a robot and get it to drive around in circles and then write a paper about the whole deal, just relax for a minute. The latest version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS robot was introduced in 2006, and the brick is now called the NXT. There have been some significant improvements over the RCX including better motors, better sensors, a better programming environment, and wireless communication via Bluetooth technology.
The Bluetooth communication is really what I’m after. I’ve had a difficult time trying to explain to people what exactly I’m doing my thesis research on, so I’ll just summarize it with this: let’s say that you have a personal handheld device with a lot of sensitive information on it…I dunno, let’s take Steve Job’s iPhone for example. It has private emails, telephone numbers, contacts, business plans, and I’m sure a whole slew of other stuff that he wouldn’t want to be compromised. It may be possible to password protect this data, but let’s be honest here, passwords always get cracked.
The solution that I am proposing (and this is where I’ll skip a lot of technical detail) is that before any of this sensitive data can be accessed it should be required that the handheld device verifies the validity of the access by contacting an external device. Phew, that’s a mouthful of jumbled crap, but bear with me for just another minute. I’m utilizing the Bluetooth in the NXT to act as my verification device, ie, the handheld will send some data to the NXT, the NXT will translate it and then send it back to the handheld. The handheld will then determine whether or not the access is acceptable. It’s a little more complicated than that because I’ll be watermarking some memory addresses and checking for sequential data access, but you can read about that in the final paper.
The Big Idea that I’m trying to portray is that without the external Bluetooth device, the handheld is basically worthless if it is lost or stolen. Okay, okay, I understand the NXT is pretty big, won’t fit in your pocket, and requires 6 AA batteries, but this is a proof of concept that I’m after. The end result will demonstrate the grand idea of a disconnected key. For more reading on key-based encryption, I point you to Google.
In observance of me fooling around with LEGOS during my thesis research, Abi insisted that we buy some LEGO Fruit Flavored Snacks from Sam’s Club. No, I can’t build robots with them, but they are fun to eat.
Anyways, can I really come up with a better storybook ending than this? I’m leaving school in 2008 the same way I entered in 2001: playing with LEGOS.
Topics: UC, technology, thesis |
March 18th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
As a bonus for reading this far down on the page, here’s a link: http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/atletismo343/lego1.htm
March 19th, 2008 at 6:35 am
Aww…that’s a sweet story. Do you live happily ever after??
March 19th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Awesome stuff. I tell people all the time that I got my degree from Lego University. There are so many times that endless hours spent trying to build the perfect city or house paid off for me in the real world. I have not advanced into the Mindstorms realm yet but my youngest is interested in that kind of stuff so perhaps a mid-summer birthday gift other than something for the Wii would be in order.
Don’t forget about the Lego-Eggo Waffles either. They are all one color and don’t last long but they are fun to play with at breakfast!
[URL=http://imageshack.us][IMG]http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/4161/eggolegotr0.jpg[/IMG][/URL]