Santileortiz

I'm studying electrical engineering in Mexico, I like to create things and I gieve a lot of importance to understandig really well the underlying concepts of things I do.

I have completed 2 courses on control theory and currently I am working in a practical lab project, I also have completed several programming courses in Python and C, and used Matlab for control systems and digital signal processing. I speak spanish and english, and have taken several college courses in english too.  

I want to participate in Google Summer of Code because I like the open development process of free software and I want to contribute to it, I am also interested in learning how to work on a really complex colaborative work environment. So far i have not participated in any Google Summer of Code but I have read about past years experiences and I feel now I can make part of it.

I think Octave could be a really good alternative to Matlab, I would like to use it in my own projects but it still needs some work in controller design interfaces which are the ones I use the most in Matlab, now I think I can help improve this aspect of the software for otrhers to use.

I have used m-scripts in digital signal processing and control courses, I know the basics of function declaration, loops and array manipulations, I know how to read the documentation so I think I could find my way arround learning new functions to be used in my code. I have used C++ for a project that uses ROS operating system, and know how object oriented programming works, but I am still fairly new to the syntax of the language. I have not used OpenGL or Qt but I am really looking forward on learning both of them.

So far most of the collaborative projects I've worked on have been for university courses. Besides this I belong to the rescue robot team of the university where we use ROS and try to keep a well documented repository of our souce code by using Git and be as open as possible about the repository. As far as open source goes I have not participated on any team, but this is some of the things I am mostly looking forward about participating in GSoC, I'd really like to learn new collaborative work schemes and bring them to my own projects like the rescue robot team.  

I think the biggest project I have worked for might be the rescue robot team, from it I learned the importance of well documented code in projects where other people needs to undestand and review your code. I also learned the importance of communication amongst the team and constant group meetings to update others about everyones work. Most of the work we have done has been to improve the odometry algorithm to finnaly accomplsh SLAM on it, the project involves programming in C++ and also C for embeded systems, right now we are migrating to a new microcontroller for faster data aquisition and I am in charge of the communication to the computer inside the robot. In the past most of my work has been to design the elecronic system that serves the robot.

I have used IRC before, most of the times on the freenode webchat, I have used mercurial only to download source code of other programs but I have used git with gitgub before from the command line. I do not know much about Mediawiki besides reading and editing some page. I oftenn install software by compiling it by using make but I have not used autotools for a completely new project. I know the basics of gdb, but most of the tme I have used graphical IDE software like Eclipse or MPLAB, but I am comfortable using command line interfaces too, as an editor I have used vim and emacs before I use the first one as my main python developing tool.

I know most of the people were really lost at first because of the lack of GUI I hope this changes with the most recent releases of tthe software.

I chose the task of making a GUI tool for controller tunning in systems, I want to focus on having the basig functionality of ading poles to the compensator and making draging of these poles possible from the rlocus plot itself, as well as moving the closed loop poles along the root locus line, and have the gain of the controller updated automatically in a way similar to rltool in Matlab.