For the last five years now, I have been involved in teaching the bachelor course on Industrial Automation. The course focuses on discrete and logical control. Apart from the lectures, the course contains two projects, one based on low-level PLC programming. The other focuses on modeling high-level discrete control programmed in Java. At the end of the course, the students integrate the Java and PLC parts of the project to have an end-to-end automated system.

Over the last five years, I have been improving and tweaking the Java part to automate most technical administration. I have integrated the checking of assignments into a Continuous Testing framework using GitHub classrooms and Travis to reduce my load of correcting them. This post is intended to document that process.

The following essay was written as part of a course I took up. The course was titled “Sustainable Development: Values, Technology in Society, and the Researcher”. It broadly gave an overview on the ethical and sustainable framework that has been developed over the last few years and the debates present within. The participants to the course came from different research fields and hence the course too was kept as broad as possible. I can be certain that the following essay is not completely accurate and only presents my views and reflections that were a result of this 3 day course.

Boston dynamics has become quite famous after the recent take over by the internet giant Google. The work done at Boston dynamics in my opinion, is ground breaking and far ahead in technology than any other country or firm has ventured into. The complex control algorithms mimicking that of real world animals to a high accuracy.

The recent acquisitions of Google spur up an all new thought process. Google acquired a total of 8 companies for their robotics division. If we look at the details of all these companies we get a fairly clear picture of what google is aiming for - building robots that look, act and work just like humans. The only difference, these new robots never get tired providing high efficiency.

After running a few hundred google searches and pushing up the budget I finally bought myself a Lenovo thinkpad t430. It was quite heavy on the pocket given the configuration but its worth every penny.

Looks

The ThinkPad will never win a beauty competition, but who cares, It more or less looks like any other thinkpad you have seen. Matt black finish, so its not a finger print magnet, but yes sweaty and oily touches leave prints tough to clean up.