User:James.sawyer

About Me

Hey!

My name is James E Sawyer and I'm a Trinity student who made the mistake of not applying to Pratt from the start. I'm currently taking a BME course load (wooo EGR103 and Molecular Bio!) and eagerly awaiting the end of the year so I can become an official Pratt Star. My love of engineering stems from my high school Battle Bots team that placed 3 robots in the top 3 nationally over the past 2 years. I also interned at a biomedical engineering firm in Miami, Syntheon LLC, the past two summers, where I met a group of brilliant engineers. It's only been two weeks of classes, but I've already set the robotics team up with my hexacopter and promised to bring up my personal 120lb Battlebot while also hanging with the SAE (racing) team and starting to CNC mill pieces for the car. This is going to be a crazy year, but Ash put it best when he shared his wisdom on college... I love it.

Name Pronunciation

My name is pretty standard American fare. James like LeBron and Sawyer like Tom.

Grand Engineering Challenges I'm Interested In

As computational power grows exponentially, as has been predicted by Moore's Law, it is likely that we will soon poses the ability to economically equal the computing power of the human brain through artificial means. One major challenge is developing the ability to process so much data, the next, and far more difficult is writing the program to run. The brain is quite the complex program...

   -Reverse-engineer the brain – NAE’s grand challenge, DLH under, created February 20, 2008, accessed September 10, 20012

Cool MATLAB Info

Something I found really amazing about MATLAB was the surf() command. I don't really have any sense of how useful making 3D arrays into graphical illustrations will be, but I get the sense it will be a useful tool to have down the road. It may not be as useful as knowing how to concatenate or transposing arrays, but it sure does look more impressive. I was shown the command for the first time in the closing seconds of the Introduction to MATLAB video (which ran me through the basics of assigning variable vaulues, creating arrays, and retrieving data from them) in the MATLAB help section. I was brought to do further research on the command, where I stumbled upon the offical MATLAB website description of the command, which I have reproduced below.

Syntax of using surf():

surf(Z) creates a three-dimensional shaded surface from the z components in matrix Z, using x = 1:n and y = 1:m, where [m,n] = size(Z). The height, Z, is a single-valued function defined over a geometrically rectangular grid. Z specifies the color data, as well as surface height, so color is proportional to surface height.

surf(Z,C) plots the height of Z, a single-valued function defined over a geometrically rectangular grid, and uses matrix C, assumed to be the same size as Z, to color the surface.

surf(X,Y,Z) uses Z for the color data and surface height. X and Y are vectors or matrices defining the x and y components of a surface. If X and Y are vectors, length(X) = n and length(Y) = m, where [m,n] = size(Z). In this case, the vertices of the surface faces are (X(j), Y(i), Z(i,j)) triples. To create X and Y matrices for arbitrary domains, use the meshgrid function.

surf(X,Y,Z,C) uses C to define color. MATLAB performs a linear transformation on this data to obtain colors from the current colormap.

surf(...,'PropertyName',PropertyValue) specifies surface Surfaceplot along with the data.

surf(axes_handles,...) plots into the axes with handle axes_handle instead of the current axes (gca).

h = surf(...) returns a handle to a Surfaceplot graphics object.

source: MathWorks - MATLAB - surf() - 3-D shaded surface plot

Past Projects

CheapShot! and El Gran Rey Cholo!