ASUS G53S Power up issue solved

Much like a lot of people online, i have been experiencing the power-up problem with my ASUS G53S laptop. In short, when the lid is open, and the ASUS laptop is already turned on, i can restart the laptop without a problem. I can even shutdown and turn it on again after a while. However, if i close the lid, and wait for a while, then try to power it up again, it just would not work!! This got really frustrating. So this is what i tried next: update BIOS, take out the battery and plug it back in again, take out the power supply plug and put it back in; however, none of these seem to work.

Then i found this forum post by the user sadozai online:  http://forum.notebookreview.com/8035363-post11.html He recommended moving a light magnet over the bottom right 2″x2″ area of the laptop, as according to him, the problem lies with the magnetic sensor installed in that area that responds to the lid open/close action. This seemed like a plausible diagnosis, so i had to test it out. All i had to do now was to find a light magnet in my office…hmmm…..how about a small motor? Motors have magnets in them right? So i just put a piece of paper on the bottom right corner and moved the motor’s butt end in circles in that area. Voila!! as soon as i pressed the power button this time, the laptop turned on without a problem! All i need now is to carry a motor with me everywhere i take my laptop :p The other option is to send it back to the shop for repair/replacement, but what fun would that be? 

Student-built vehicle finds its own way

Source: The Daily Bulletin, University of Waterloo

A team of undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Waterloo Robotics Team and the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Lab are back from the recent Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition with the best showing of any Canadian entry.

Seen in the photo, left to right, are faculty advisor Steven Waslander (mechanical and mechatronics engineering), PJ Mukhurjee, Sid Ahuja, Arun Das, Michael Tribou. Key team members not pictured include Peiyi Chen and Ryan Turner.

The 19th annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition was held at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. It’s described as one of the largest and most prestigious competitions for custom autonomous vehicles in North America. The competition is run annually by the Associate for Unmanned Vehicle’s International, with sponsors including the US Department of Defense, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.

The Waterloo entry — named Indrik — placed second out of 56 teams from the United States, Canada, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates in the vehicle design competition, winding up just 4 points (out of a possible 300) behind the grand prize winner. Waterloo also finished 4th in the JAUS challenge, which requires successful implementation of an industrial calibre communications framework for autonomous vehicles.

According to Craig MacKenzie, a member of the team’s executive, the competitors are also looking forward to a top-ten finish in the autonomous navigation challenge, which requires vehicles to autonomously navigate between four GPS waypoints while dynamically avoiding obstacles including construction barrels and staggered fencing without human intervention. Full results will be released at the end of the month.

The competition also features a “fully autonomous” challenge (without GPS) requiring navigation of a simulated roadway strewn with barricades. A last-minute failure of the vision computer left Indrik unable to participate properly in that event.

However, the team’s solid mechanical design and software strategies were widely recognized by competitors. “Our custom suspension design and unique approach to mapping and path planning generated a lot of interest with the other teams and industry representatives,” says a report from Rochester. “We are eagerly looking forward to continued development and even more success in the future!”

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 35,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 35 posts. There were 7 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb.

The busiest day of the year was October 20th with 227 views. The most popular post that day was Correlation based similarity measures-Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stackoverflow.com, en.wordpress.com, physicsforums.com, google.com, and google.co.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sum of squared differences, census transform, normalized cross correlation, siddhant ahuja, and sum of squared differences matlab.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Correlation based similarity measures-Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) May 2009
19 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

2

Correlation based similarity measure-Sum of Squared Differences (SSD) May 2009
14 comments

3

Correlation based similarity measure-Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC) May 2009
5 comments

4

Camera Calibration using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in MATLAB February 2010

5

Census Transform in Image Processing May 2009

The robot uprising

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