Happy Holidays From The Hanke's

Julia and Yeti below the Christmas tree.

From Uncatogorized_Winter_2009

Honeymoon in Nepal

Day One -- Denver To L.A. To Bangkok



Day Two -- L.A. To Bangkok To Kathmandu



Day Three



Day Four



Day Five



Day Six



Day Seven



Day Eight



Day Nine



Day Ten



Day Eleven



Day Twelve



Day Thirteen



Day Fourteen



Day Fifteen



Day Sixteen



Day Seventeen



Day Eighteen



Day Nineteen

Mount Elbert

On a beautiful August day, Julia, Yeti and I decided to hike a bit longer more difficult route up the tallest mountain in the Rockies, Mount Elbert (14,443'). We choose the Black Cloud trailhead. This trail has the most vertical gain at over 5,300' of any routes of the mountain. Depending on who you talk to, this route also covers two 14ers. We didn't see another person on the trail until the summit.

This isn't the longest 14er that I've climbed, but it was certainly one of the hardest. The round trip time on the trail was a little over 10 hours. The trail wasn't well maintained and non-existent for many stretches, probably due to it's lack of popularity. The way up the steep, dirt sections wasn't bad, but the way down was rough! It was good fun, but I'm not yet sure if I would recommend that route to anyone else. There are several other routes that are surely more enjoyable. Another one down....

-Erich

Mount Bierstadt Hike

Last weekend, Julia, my parents and I hiked Mount Bierstadt. Julia and I wanted a short 14er for our first of the summer. We took Guannella Pass up to the trailhead which was a bit more eventful than expected due to construction on the road. There were several spots on the pass that were single lane only which we had to wait at a temporary stop light to wait for the opposite going traffic to pass. This turned out to be quite a hassle on the way down due to a bad accident on the other side of the pass.

The Hike was short and and sweet. We saw a rare Colorado Moose near the trailhead swimming in a pond. The worst part of this hike was the winding willows near the bottom of the mountain. Other than that, it was a bunch of fun. A five hour round trip is quite short for a 14er, but it was still a good time just to get out there.

-Erich

St. Mary's Glacier --- Skiing in August

On a beautiful, sunny, Colorado summer day, we decided to get out and do some hiking. What better way to get down the hill then on skis!

Jason, Melissa, Eric, Steph and I headed up a short trail to the snow field named St. Mary's Glacier. This is not a true glacier because it does not flow, but it's still fun to ski on! Jason and Melissa are on their 11th consecutive month of skiing in Colorado. Their goal is 20+ months, but I can guess that soon they will start counting in years instead of months.

I have some video footage from our ride down, so check back later.

Jason's pictures are located here

August, still ski season in Colorado.

-Erich

Ubuntu 9.04

Yesterday I upgraded my OS from Ubuntu Hardy Herion 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Yet again, Ubuntu has done an exceptional job making the install process fast and simple. The whole install process took only 15 minutes and required only 8 mouse clicks. Talk about simplicity!
You can also now install Ubuntu as an application inside of a lesser Operating System (Windows XP/Vista) using Wubi. This is a great option for windows users who don't want to commit to creating a partition on their machine and want the freedom to remove Ubuntu at anytime. That's the great thing about Linux in general, freedom.

Finaly Finished!

This was my end of semester project for a Realtime Digital Media and Robotics class. We used a 6-degree of freedom robotic arm controlled using 2.6 Linux and POSIX threading.
The Robot's main objective was to raster through the playing field looking for red, then green blocks stacking the blocks without any user control. We used computer vision algorithms to close the control loop for the system. This project was a lot of fun!









This is an early version of the HAMSTer cart with only infrared sensors enabled. This was my Electrical Engineering Capstone Final Project. I worked along with 3 other engineering students to build this fully autonomous rover in 16-weeks completely from scratch. The main control unit of this system is a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA which handled all the image processing as well as kinematics (6-servos). The Pathing algorithms and GPS communications were handled by the Virtex's internal hardcore PowerPC440 microprocessor.
The bot is getting GPS coordinates and calculating a path to get to that position while avoiding objects. You can see the stereo-vision cameras mounted on the front of the cart on the tilt-pan servos, but they are not currently being used in this video.