Final thoughts on "Nanotechnology: The Basics"

Yesterday I took the final exam of "Nanotechnology: The Basics" online course.
The course is held by professor Vicki Colvin and professor Daniel Mittleman from the RICE university on Coursera.

I didn't have much time, so I attended just the basic lessons. I found the topics of the course really interesting.

The course lasted four weeks. Here below the list of the weekly topics:

1. Introduction to nanotechnology
2. Nanoelectronics
3. Nanomagnetics
4. Nanophotonics

The most interesting thing I have learned during the course is how the material properties completely changes when they are really small.

Another fascinating effect we seen is the quantum confinement effect. Take a look at at the Quantum dot page on wikipedia!

Color fading with arduino

Yesterday evening I encountered this question on StackOverflow website.

In my opinion, the low quality of the original code is the main problem here. I suggested Tristan to use the Arduino Tinker Library and I wrote an example just for him.

#include <Vect3d.h>
#include <SerialLog.h>

Tinker::Vect3d<float> red(255,0,0);
Tinker::Vect3d<float> green(0,255,0);
Tinker::SerialLog serialLog;

void setup(){
  Serial.begin(9600);
  serialLog.display("Fade color example");  
  serialLog.endline();
}

void loop(){
  //fade factor computation
  const uint32_t t   = millis()%10000;
  const float cosArg = t/10000.*3.1415*2;
  const float fade   = abs(cos(cosArg));

  //Here's the color computation... as you can see is very easy to do!! :)
  Tinker::Vect3d<uint8_t> finalColor(red*fade + green*(1-fade));

  //We print the vect3d on the arduino serial port
  Tinker::LOG::displayVect3d(finalColor,&serialLog);
  serialLog.endline();
  delay(500);
}

This example will print the following output on the serial port:

Fade color example
V[255;0;0]
V[242;12;0]
V[206;48;0]
V[149;105;0]
V[78;176;0]
V[0;254;0]
V[79;175;0]
V[150;104;0]
V[206;48;0]
V[242;12;0]
V[254;0;0]
V[242;12;0]
V[205;49;0]
V[148;106;0]
V[77;177;0]
V[1;253;0]
V[80;174;0]
V[151;103;0]


If you want to fade multiple colors in one of your sketch you can simply use this code! :)

PS: Today I found this question on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20482642/how-to-fade-between-two-vectors-by-value.

I'm really proud that someone is using the Arduino Tinker Library :)