So I’ve been messing around with it some recently ever since Fedex broke him. I have all kinds of upgrades for him as well that I plan on installing. For starters though, I had to see what was broken, which was the crappy Arduino I had assembled. To replace this, I have an Overo/Robovero that [...]
Interactive R2-D2 Update
Mar 3
I originally set out to try different techniques for facial recognition, and I feel like I made some serious progress and learned a lot about different methods to increase accuracy. The main algorithm to recognize the faces was eigenfaces, although I believe fisherfaces may have been a better alternative. This, combined with other methods I’ll mention, gave me about 50%-60% accuracy, which is good enough for most applications. I began with the code found here, but made several major modifications to adapt the code to try new things.
Tetris AI
Oct 20
This is a project I’ve been working on for the past week or so. It turned out much better than I expected, and it was a lot simpler than I expected as well.
DARwin-OP Bipedal Robot
Jul 23
As someone who is massively interested in robotics, I love the idea of this little guy. Darwin-OP is an open source, open hardware robotics project created by a few different schools. It’s so close to being everything I dreamed in a mini sized humanoid robot. Unfortunately, it costs $12,000 or (12,000,000 won, since it’s manufactured by a Korean company), but you can make it yourself with the provided CAD documents and assembly guides.
University Quadrotor
Jul 16
Right now I’m the project leader on my university’s quadrotor team. I don’t want to post too much, since we compete in CARD (the new FIRST college level games), but it’s pretty cool so far. We’re completely starting from scratch since last year we performed very poorly (actually, not at all due to a bad crash).
Solar Cost/Benefit Analysis
Jul 16
This is something that’s interested me for a while, and I finally got around to crunching some numbers the other day to see if this would be worth it. I am an amateur, and I have never seen or installed a solar system myself, so I’m probably wrong in a lot of spots. Don’t take this as a guide, since some of the things I’m mentioning might be against building codes or dangerous, since there’s a lot I haven’t considered or just plain don’t know. As usual, you assume all responsibility for what you take from this article. Keep note as you read that I plan on doing all the labor myself which is a massive cut in costs for getting them constructed, installed and wired.
In light (that’s a terrible pun) of the new legislation passed regarding light bulbs I figured I’d shed some light (another terrible pun) on the subject. Some people still aren’t convinced about how much better CFLs are than Incandescent lights. The point of this article is to directly compare the cost of using Incandescent lights, CFLs, and LED lights as well as debunk many of the myths surrounding them.
Audio Visualizer
Jul 12
A while ago I had to write a FFT application for a class and ever since then I have been working on a collection of objects and functions that have to do with audio and music. This is one of the first things I started on.
Yumi Multiboot Creator
Jul 12
This is one of those things that should be in every IT guy’s arsenal. If you were a Jedi, this would be your lightsaber. I’m not going to writeup how to use it since it’s pretty self explanatory, and there’s directions at the link. Basically what it does is it allows you to have multiple ISOs on a single flash drive that you can boot from. In my case I have it setup with Hiren’s Boot CD, Backtrack, Ophcrack, and Ubuntu. Basically I walk around my job and fix things like a boss. Check it out here.
GCL Compiler
May 24
This is easily the most difficult coding problem I’ve ever had to do. Normal programming is nothing like writing a compiler. It was written mostly by my professor, with massive coding additions made by myself and my partner. I’m also in the process of writing an optimizer/interpreter with a couple of other guys.
GCL stands for guarded command language, not to be confused with GNU common lisp, and was originally defined by Dijkstra. You can get the full explanation of it on the Wikipedia article. There is no defined grammar for it, at least that I know of, but for the class it was written for our professor defined one.