by Brian Bosley

Welcome back to a new year! SigMicro is currently gearing up for EOH. Work is proceeding on the computer-controlled telescope and the LEGO ALU. Basically, what we have done is construct a telescope with help from the members of the Astronomical Society. We want to allow someone using the telescope to just enter a star, planet, or other astronomical object either by name or number and the telescope will automatically find the object and then track it across the sky. The telescope project is now in the computer hardware/software phase. The teams are just starting to form, so if you have any programming in C, or basic hardware background you can join in the fun. If you are interested in becoming a team member, send email to Brian Bosley at bosleyb@uiuc.edu.

For some time now, the LEGO subgroup of ACM's SigMicro has been developing an exhibition for this year's Engineering Open House. At last year's EOH, we demonstrated a prize-winning binary adder built entirely from LEGO pieces. This year, we'll be improving that idea, possibly by incorporating memory. Other prototypes have resembled arithmetic logic unitsÑcomputer modules which perform calculations. Does this sound interesting to you? We need all the help we can get! Send email to Norbert Burger at burger@cs.uiuc.edu for more info.

Also coming up soon will be a field trip to Motorola in Urbana. The nice folks at Motorola offered to give us a tour of their facility during normal business hours. If you are interested, send me days and hours you are available so I can find a time that will be best for the most people.

We will also sponsor some more workshops this semester. One such possibility is a C++ workshop. If you would like to learn more about a specific topic, then please suggest it. I am sure there are others that are also interested in learning about the same things. Some of our workshops from last semester included the C, Macintosh, and Windows programming workshops.

Our normal meeting time is Mondays at 8pm in 1102 DCL. You can watch for meeting announcements and other SigMicro information on uiuc.acm, or visit the office. As always, I can be reached at sigmicro@uiuc.edu.