My Project Website
As of the 2011 AUVSI competition, one requirement for entry is the submission of a short video which describes the team. In the last week before the competition, I helped our team produce the following video, which highlights our 2011 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle named Drekar. The video describes our team's organization and illustrates some steps of the design process.
For more information about what we do, check out http://cuauv.org.
This is my first attempt at developing an Arduino library. This library, developed for a friend's use, allows an Arduino to easily communicate with a 8 character LCD driver module. The creation of this project involved interpretation of a datasheet's communication protocol and subsequent emulation of this protocol on the Arduino to allow for usage. The result is a module that allows for someone to write numbers to the lcd screen with minimal programming effort. It was quite fun to create and I gained some knowledge about how to read datasheets and implement pre-specified protocols.
Check out the library, hosted on Google Code, link below:
https://code.google.com/p/arduino-icm7218-library/
An Arduino hooked up to the icm7218 chip.
This robot was controlled by an Arduino microcontroller connected to my Tablet PC by USB. The Tablet PC in this setup was serving as a byte relay enabling wifi adhoc control of the robot as well as streaming the video from the webcam to the controlling PC. The ultimate goal of this project was to eliminate the tablet by replacing it with a Linksys WRT54GL router which would communicate with the microcontroller over the serial protocol based on TCP/IP commands. Eventually, this robot might be equipped with sensors which will allow it to be programmed to run autonomously.
The first revision of the robot is featured in the video below:
Unfortunately, the latest revision of the robot was not filmed.
This project is currently on hold indefinitely, but may be picked up in the future.
This was the interface for controlling the robot on the remote PC which I programmed. It would convert a joystick location to two motor PWM output, not a simple task.
Interesting Fact: On it's first outdoor run (which was sadly not filmed), this robot had a mild crash with one of my friend's car leaving a battle scar on my tablet PC that is still there today.
This Christmas, I decided to automate our Family Room Christmas lights using my previously built Parallel Port 8 channel interface box. This box allows for the computer to control 8 different segments of lights via a transistor array and automotive relays.
The relay box was then hooked up to my Pentium 3 server which was placed behind the tree with a wifi connection to the network and internet.
This server allowed for light control via direct posts to its web server, UDP broadcasts from other computers in the network, and from local Remote Desktop commands to run various local programs.
I also designed a website in which anyone in my home network could control the lights via their web browser. This website also had public access enabled between the hours of 11pm and 5am during which anyone online could visit the webpage and control the lights. These hours were chosen in order to avoid annoying the family with excessive random light flashing.
Check out the video of the lights in action below:
This year, our band director, Mr. Rupert, decided that our Wind Ensemble would enter a Pep Band piece, In The Stone, into the annual KZOK Battle of the Bands competition. Mr. Rupert invoked my help for the video editing as well as assistance in the filming process. We decided that we would take a trip up a local mountain and film a scene on top.
This video project took around a week to complete with several days of planning, several days of filming, and several days of editing. The deadline for the video also happened to coincide with the deadline for MIT's Early Action Application, so that was fun. The video has been submitted as of November 1st and is available for public viewing.
Our video was recently featured in our local newspaper; check out the following link:
http://snovalleystar.com/2010/01/13/mount-si-students-literally-climb-mountain-to-film-video
Update (02/03/2010): We have just made it past the voting phase of the competition. Our video and 9 others will be judges by a panel of celebrity judges who will determine the winners of the competition.
Update (02/18/2010): The results of the contest have been released and unfortunately, we did not place in the top 7. However, an individual decided that our movie deserved more and donated $1000 to our band program. Despite this rather disappointing outcome, I am still glad that I played a part in the production of this video.
The video is embedded below; if you have the bandwidth, please watch it in HD 1080p.