Blog 1 | George Lipceanu

January 30th, 2026. 

Hello :)

1) Bio:

My name is George Lipceanu and I'm currently in my 4th year of Applied Computing (Cloud & Networks) here at SETU Waterford. I enjoy playing chess, video games, going to the gym and making music. I feel like you can find out a lot about a person based on the music they listen to so because of this, I decided to make a Topster of some of my favourite albums/mixtapes of all time. 😊

2) Blog post that I found interesting: 

Reading through the blog posts from 2025's "A Big Heart :-)" blog, one that I found particularly interesting was the Blog 2 - HRV Demo. I like how even though it is an early lab for the team, I find that it still shows a lot actually being done physically as opposed to just theoretical programming for hypothetical scenarios, and it makes me feel really excited for my future experiences in the module and on the BinBot project. I will say that I do find Blogger very confusing at the moment, like regarding last blog, I think it is an early lab based on what the author is actually writing, suggested when they open with:

                    "For the second lab, ..."

while it also saying the blog was posted at the end of May, which is the in the later end of the semester. Also I don't even know who the author is for this blog in particular. I understand this is probably just because this is my first time using this site to blog and this type of blog setup specifically, so I believe that it will make sense in time. As of right now though, I just can't seem to understand this website's layout.😅

3) BinBot thoughts/ideas: 

Last class, we watched some videos on some of the BinBots current features and I was and still am quite impressed with how lifelike the bot is. I love how its exaggerated movements make it feel like a bin with some kind of life and conscious thought behind its muppet-esque eyes. 

    One idea that I think would be pretty interesting relates to the tracking video found here. Now I know that something similar might have already been added since it has been a long time since this video was first posted however, I think that if there was a way to add some kind of noise or jingle based on the distance between the BinBot tracker and the piece of rubbish to throw away, that would be pretty fun ☺️. The way I have it in my head is something similar to the Fortnite chest sound, which can be listened to here, and the closer that the piece of rubbish is to the bin the louder or clearer this sound gets, with it finally making some kind of ding or any sort of rewarding type of sound when it is actually put into the bin (something like this here). Or even the opposite for things that aren't rubbish maybe, like negative sounds for the inverse. I don't know how feasible this is to add to the project in its current state BUT I do think that it could be fun to look into.

4) State machine diagrams: 

The past 2 weeks we also looked at finite state machines and state machine diagrams, and how they are genuinely the best thing ever created (supposedly). I had come across them before throughout my studies but had never really been given an explanation to what the diagrams are fundamentally. They were just used to explain the concepts being taught at the time, which is fine but learning more about them now, having this structure to a concept that you want to turn a into a reality would have been useful. But alas, its better to learn about them now as opposed to never learning at all.

    According to this source from Stanford University, finite state machines originated in the 1940s by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts to present a description of finite automata in 1943. Some examples of where these have been used is the self-driving car, the mars rover, and the DRS system in F1, which will be covered in the next paragraph.

    We investigated early samples of the DRS state machine diagrams and we were required to put our own improvements on it, which I have detailed in the figure below:

I feel that this exercise really helped me understand how much can be covered in the initial idea phase of a project and how easily things can be configured or modified while also being very interpretable just by looking at the diagram. I have a "PROBLEMS" section that I added which could be an issue in the future for this scenario, which I could have added fixes for but chose not to since this was towards the end of class and I simply figured that it is just something to note as opposed to something that NEEDS to be fixed.