Projects
My entire life I’ve been captivated by disassembling things, learning their secrets, and trying to tweak or improve upon their originally functionality. When I’m not actively pursuing research or academic goals I like to hack things. Here are some of the things I’ve done in my spare time that I’m most proud of.
The Great RFID Coffee Maker Hack
In my research group we had a Keurig coffee maker. It’s a very nice piece of machinery, worth taking apart to admire the engineering efforts that went into making such a device a commercial product, but it has one tragic flaw: it’s completely insecure. With K-cups costing an arm and a leg to purchase we needed a system to place accountability on those who consumed the most coffee, hence the great coffee maker hack was born. Read More
Reverse Geocache (in progress)
This is a box with a built-in GPS receiver that will only open when the receiver takes it to a specific location. The interface is simple, upon receiving (it’s intended to be given as a gift), one pressed the button on the front side of the box. The box lights up and determines the distance to the location, and displays it on the screen. Using a map and a compass (guess which type!) one can then create a probable guess as to where the box needs to be taken to be opened.
This is a work in progress, as the first project I’m dedicated to fully writing up, feel free to check out my main blog for the build log, upon completion I’ll link to the complete series here.
Computer-Controlled Air Conditioner
My apartment is frustrating, the air conditioner is from the late 60s and it is what you’ll find pictured in the dictionary when the word “inefficient” is looked up. My electricity bill jumps up hundreds of dollars during the summer, completely disproportional to the modest living space I occupy. While I cannot do anything about this I certainly can monitor air conditioner usage as to better estimate and control my cooling costs. Read More
Quadcopter!
Quadcopters are ridiculously cool. I built one in my spare time and heavily modified it to turn it into a mean, lean, flying machine. Some of the highlights of my build are:
- Modified speed controllers to support I2C-based addressing to give a full byte of addressable speed control levels
- Custom directional-cosign-matrix implementation that better takes into account magnetometer data
- Integration of ultrasonic sensor to accurately sense near-earth heights.
In my spare time I like to try to cook up new projects and ideas around this quadcopter. My dream is to mount fireworks on it and activate them remotely by relay. I’m currently working towards both this goal, and making it completely autonomous with take-off and landing functionality.
Genetic Algorithms
I picked up a copy of MIT’s book on genetic programming by John Koza and have implemented my own genetic programming algorithm in C#, which deploys on a cluster of machines and scales with the use of a coordinating server. I’m absolutely fascinated by the results an algorithm produces. I’ve run simulations with large multivariable mathematical functions and the results it produces after a few hundred iterations are impressive, achieving error rates of less than 2% deviation.
Wireless TI-83+ Calculators
The TI-83 Plus is an amazing success story for TI. In the 10 years it has been in production every single component that makes this calculator has dropped like a rock. This calculator must cost a tenth of what it did originally to manufacturer, and an engineer probably hasn’t actually touched the code base in 5 years. The only thing about this calculator that hasn’t dropped is the price. Educators love it because it’s so easily cleared and is so basic a student couldn’t possibly cheat using it. Or could they?
As a proof of concept (I shall never encourage cheating, education is a wonderful thing) a few years back, I built a pair of wireless calculators using the IO expansion port and a dirt-cheap, serial wireless communication circuit available from Sparkfun.
