So I started watching Intel a lot more since they were at CES last year and reveled the Edison, I posted about it here. It was pretty cool, and I even saw it at U of O when the creator came to show it off. His name is Michael McCool, I think he is friends with a professor at our school who also works with Intel and teaches architecture related classes (I took his parallel programming course). It was cool he came out to U of O to talk about it! Anyways this year Intel announced a few more new things at CES that caught my eye. The real sense technology looks cool. They also made a small embedded computer called Curie, which I assume McCool is behind and is maybe an improvement of the Edison, but not really sure. I believe it uses the same Intel Quark processor as the Edison.
My favorite part of the Intel releases at CES was the drones with real sense cameras technology that they actually demonstrated on stage live during the keynote. This was legendary, and what everyone (researching technical aspects of drones) has wanted to see drones do. Self sufficient autonomous flight with no tie to GPS or a fixed environment. I knew it was close, I have been so impressed with the work the people of The Flying Arena in Zurich Switzerland and the GRASP lab at UPenn, both of their press was incredible! I also could sense Intel’s interest in drones, and knew they would play a part. This time it looks like a company called Ascending Technologies has made the new with Intel. I don’t know much about that company (will research in near future), but I did just learn that a friend of mine worked with them at the dawn of quardrocopters sometime in the 2000’s, I now get to work with him! I watched the keynote Intel presentation at CES, specifically the section with drones a couple times now. They really did it, and wow, it is very impressive!
Having acquired some beginner knowledge and experience developing computer hardware applications and quadrocopters with autonomous functionality, working at the uoregon CAES lab and during side projects/hobbies that have taught me to learn and appreciate how incredibly complicated it is to engineer in this field. This is one where engineers deal with developing robots or smart physical objects that are connected and sophisticated. These engineers require the ability to solve problems from many fields, from software to circuit design to mechanical implementations, these guys think about much more than what a software engineer thinks about, and I think that is what interests me. Diving deeper into this field, I am talking about when the subject of engineering combines knowledge from all robotics, aeronautics, physics and computer engineering, in order to build impressive systems like the drones Ascending Technologies built with Intel’s chip. It is truly a field for genius’s, and I am appreciative, impressed, ambitions, and very interested in those who spend their time learning and developing on/with such complicated systems. I was able to make this conclusion after working for a two months with Piotr in the uoregon CAES lab. He is very smart, and an example example of the type of engineer I am trying to describe. Main point, being an engineer able to make new applications with multiple pieces of cutting edge technology from the ground up successfully is one of the most difficult types of engineering I am familiar with, and it is really impressive to see the accomplishments Ascending Technologies and Intel has made.
Personal note: I wish was was this smart. I am on the cusp of potentially getting on a road in that direction, but that will take a huge amount of work, and even then I might fail. So it leaves me in a pickle, shoot for the moon and apply for these kind of jobs despite my lack of experience and knowledge and convince myself I can be this smart if I work hard enough (which as much as I like, can be time consuming and not always as rewarding as you want), or I can shift my knowledge and efforts for a job less engineering intensive, but still involved in production, or lastly I can go for a web programming position, which I think I am decent enough at to please a company at which learning their stack would make them happier(haha).
heres the two videos, one from Intel’s keynote presentation at CES, and another was from before in the SC mountains I believe..
This one was a live performance at CES, thumbnail doesn’t appear for some reason, but link works.
This is the promo video they shot a few days before the event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj-5RNdUz3I&feature=youtu.be