Studies

Flying airplanes and living life

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So I haven’t written anything on this website for quite some time. Nothing much has happened since my last post, besides one little thing. I took my private pilot’s license (PPL), which I am very proud of. I am certified to fly small single-engine piston (SEP) airplanes up to 5700 kg and land them on land, not water. This happened at the end of June 2015, so it has actually been a while. Since then, I have logged a little more than 70 hours of flight time, mainly on Cessnas 172 and 152. In September 2015, I started working on my night rating (NQ) to fly during the night. I still have one hour of flight left before I get this rating, but the school, some school in south Sweden (ha!) that I went to, had their teaching permission revoked due to some administrative hurdles. Hopefully, they will get it back sometime in March, and I will finish my rating.

One more thing that I have been doing is studying ATPL theory at TFHS, the aviation school of Lund University (I can’t seem to detach myself from this university). I’m still at the stage where I’m doing my school exams before moving on to the EASA exams. I should complete those sometime in early summer (ha-ha summer in Sweden), and then I should attempt the EASA exams. A really nice tool for helping me in my ATPL studies is the aviation exam. They are not paying me anything for writing about them here, I really find them useful, and I want to share my experience with other students.

So long people, be happy and enjoy life!

Oh, and by the way, here is a video of the first flight of the year in snowy Sweden:

Master’s Thesis: Improved traffic safety by wireless vehicular communication

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I have recently completed, presented, defended and passed my master’s thesis project. It was a great experience which I believe has the potential of preventing traffic accidents and saving human lives. Bellow you can read the abstract and if you are interested you may download the whole report here:

Abstract

In tomorrow’s vehicle industry vehicles will have the ability to communicate and cooperate with each other in order to avoid collisions and provide useful information to each other. However, for this cooperation to be possible all vehicles will have to be equipped with compatible wireless 802.11p modules that implement the ITS-G5 standard. During the implementation phase of the system, there will be plenty of older vehicles without such equipment.

This thesis addresses this problem by developing the hardware and software for a roadside unit called Drive ITS. It consists of a universal medium-range radar that detects older vehicles, an 802.11p modem that forwards their position and speed vectors to newer vehicles, and an embedded system that utilizes and integrates those two parts.

The hardware for the embedded system is divided into two main parts; a microcontroller board and a single-board microcomputer. The software is written in two programming languages; C++ for the microcontroller and Java for the microcomputer.

Tests have been performed by comparing Drive ITS results to results from other vehicles that already implement the ITS-G5 standard and it has been confirmed that the system works as it was intended to.

This solution will prevent potential accidents of newer ITS-G5 vehicles with older ordinary vehicles thus saving human lives.

Harlem Shake with a Stewart platform

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I had a project assignment to do for one of my university courses (Numerical Analysis). The project was about modeling a Stewart platform in MATLAB. I took it a step further and animated a Harlem Shake of the final result. Enjoy the video!

Here is the code that I have written to generate the images compiled in the video above:

Master Thesis Prototype

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Currently, I am doing my Master’s Thesis at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University. In this project, we aim to demonstrate a new concept for improving traffic safety using wireless communication between vehicles.

This image is a sneak peek into our second prototype. Can you guess what the lower part is? The final report will be published here in the middle of June.