Wifi-based trilateration on Android
Triangulation offers a way to locate yourself in space. Cartographers in the 1600s originally used the technique to measure things like the height of the cliff, which would be too impractical to measure directly. Later, triangulation evolved into an early navigation system when Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snell discovered three points can be used to locate a point on a […]
Quickie: Which way does gravity point?
Everyone knows a compass always points north, and most people know it’s because of magnetic fields present on Earth’s surface. There’s another force here on Earth directed to a central point, and that’s gravity. Humans are quite adept at sensing gravity thanks to equilibrioception, where fluid contained in structures in our inner ear provide feedback to […]
CS530 Visualization Projects
This is a collection of projects I created for CS 530: Introduction to Computer Visualization. Each project required an HTML writeup, so I figured it would be easiest to keep a collection of links here… Project 1: First Steps with VTK To get acquainted with the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), we used bathymetry (sea depth) and […]
Wind Turbine Analysis
For our final project for CS 59000: Embedded Systems, a partner and I implemented several tests on a small-scale wind turbine using the Texas Instruments MSP430 board. We use the Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) to gather information on voltage generated by the turbine and rotations per minute calculated with the help of an […]
Arduino Web Server
Winter break means plenty of time to toy around with something new. I’m not sure what inspired this project, perhaps the ethernet driver we designed for our Operating Systems course, but I’ve decided to explore the field of embedded networking. And you can’t get much more embedded than a 16 MHz Arduino Uno with 32K […]
Caterpillar iPhone App
I was hired to add functionality to an existing iPhone app for Caterpillar’s tree harvesting service. The goal is to give Caterpillar the ability to track and record data about their equipment during use. Data is stored in an Entity model using SQL Lite and the iPhone’s Core Data framework. The app follows a walk-through […]
MultiType Eclipse Plugin
As part of this team project for my CS 307 software engineering course, we developed a collaborative editor plug-in for the Eclipse environment. Users are able to share source code files with other users, who can view changes made to a document by other users in real-time, and make their own viewable modifications. The plug-in […]
Arduino-controlled Robotic Arm with Android Interface
Project hosted on Google Code [LINK]. Continuing my trend of Arduino projects, I decided to toy around with this robotic arm I got for Christmas. The arm is not the best construction, using DC motors instead of servos, but with Adafruit’s motor/stepper/servo shield kit, I think I can make it somewhat more useful. First to […]
Arduino OBD-II Interface
For my CS 497 Spring 2011 course, I worked on an independent study project creating an Arduino-based OBD-II (vehicle onboard diagnostic) interface written in C. First, I assembled an interface between an Arduino Uno and the ISO9141 bus that most vehicles prior to 2008 use. An open-source project called OBDuino describes how to assemble such […]
CityBus iPhone App
CityBus iPhone is currently in development as part of a Purdue ACM SigApp application. As of now we have a tab-based interface with one tab displaying a MapKit UI with route overlays and the other tab with a UITableView representing the route selections. Certain stops can also be turned ‘on’ via annotations. Touching a bus […]