Michaelsoft Systems

About Me

I am Michael Petz, a graduate of Mohawk College's Computer Engineering Technician program. Since the age of 10, I have taken a serious interest in working with computers.

It wasn't until I went through high school that I learned about the hardware aspect. Although my high school had no computer hardware courses, I took electronics, and through that, I learned a lot of computer skills by tinkering with old systems. I really owe a lot of my computer knowledge to my electronics teacher Mr. Montgomery. He kindly offered to take me into his grade 11 class while I was in grade 10 since the new curriculum no longer offered electrical.

It was here that my computer experience and education began. Throughout the rest of my high school years, I took electronics classes that were a year ahead, earning high marks and expanding my knowledge. I have to say, it was one of the best times of my life.

While in high school, I joined Stage Crew and quickly became involved in a number of events. In my senior year, I became head student for the stage crew, and since grade 9, have been involved in two major school plays. But my experiences didn't end there, I got involved with the video crew as well, filming events for Crime Stoppers, Continuing Education, Diversity Camp and even helped out with the Pilgrimage of the Cross ceremony at Cathedral of Christ the King Parish.

Now that I finished college, I have furthered my knowledge and experience, I look back at high school and miss those times. While I was attending college I learned new things such as programming in Visual Basic, JavaScript, ASP and VBScript. I've also expanded my knowledge of networking, PC interfacing, automation and electronics. Although I wasn't as involved as I was in high school, I still enjoy working with computers and helping out family and friends who are having computer problems, trying to resolve the problem or problems as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Projects

Webserver

After my struggle with tripod, I set up my own Webserver. I have a dedicated HTTP server running in my basement which enables me to host this website for free. As well as hosting my own site, I also host a few sites for a few friends. I also help a service called Folding@Home by donating idle CPU time to help process protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. This service uses a method called Distrubuted Computing to accomplish this.

A short history can be found Here

Parallel Port

While in electronics class I learned how to use Turing, a program which allows interfacing to the PC's ports (COM and Parallel). It was here that this project began to take shape, my dad wanted to hookup a motor to his bedroom shade so he could control it from bed, I took it a step farther. I designed a module which allowed me to connect the motor and my shade to the PC's parallel port.

Researching how to control the parallel port using Visual Basic was not as easy as I hoped. I wrote a program that sends out 1 in binary to put the shade up and 2 to put the shade down using delays as limits. I then added an alarm option that allows me to set times in which the shade can automatically go up and down.

I am planning on re-designing the module to allow me to use limit switches instead of delays and also add a light sensor so I don't need my computer on for it to go up in the morning. It will still be able to be controlled via the computer but be more independent.

Click Here for more details on my Parallel Port Project.
Click Here for more infomation and to download a sample project. (ZIP) (17.1KB)

LEGO Mindstorms

Using the LEGO Mindstorms: Robotic Invention System 2.0 my grade 12 class created our very own robots and programmed them to do a variety of tasks. This final assignment introduced us to the variety of different uses for robotics in today's world, allowing us to have fun. I really enjoyed working on this project, because I was able to use my troubleshooting skills to overcome any obstacles we encountered.

My Group: My group created the robotic arm. We modified the original arm to our needs and ideas. I supplied a third motor so we could control the claw separately, so it could pickup, move and drop whatever it picked up into a paper box.

How it Worked: The claw rotated in a semi-circle until it found an object darker than the table top. It would then stop, bend down, and pick it up. It would return to the box, hit a designated switch and drop the object into the box. Afterwards, it would restart and begin looking for another dark object.

Click Here to see some pictures of the project.
Click Here to see a demo video of the robotic arm. (WMV) (1.2MB)