Quick tool for diff. calc HW

Differential calculus is beating me black and blue. But at least the bruises are pretty. I made this little tool using Processing and the new Java scripting library. It draws slope field for a given differential equation as a field of vectors.

I got a Nook Touch e-reader second hand, rooted it, wrote an android app for it, and wrote a tiny Node.js server to talk to the app so that I could have a remotely-controlled low-power monochrome display. The server sends bitmaps to the Nook using Sockets, so any arbitrary B&W image can be displayed on the Nook remotely, as long as it is connected to the internet.

I worked on this robot  all day for 3 weeks with my two teammates Skyler and Faruh for the 6.270 competition here at MIT. It was an intense experience, and I am proud that we made it through to create the robot that we did. Although we did extremely poorly in the final competition (immediately running into the arena wall and getting stuck) the underlying engineering is sound. It came down in the end to either operating with an unsuccessful subset of features or stretching and gambling on an untested full set.

A person on my hall sent out an email about this fun little text adventure meant to exercise your programming skills. There are three challenges and a bonus. I spent a bit of this morning using it as an opportunity to keep learning Python. For anyone out there looking to cheat, or learn, I’ve posted my code here.

Internet waves emanating from MIT, localized on Beast in E.C.

Math Class + Music?

For one of my personal hackathons a year or so ago I made this audio synthesizer backpack for my TI 84+. It contains an Atmega168 emulating a SID (sound chip in the Commodore64) and audio amplification circuitry as well as a 9v battery for power. The backpack gets commands from the calculator through the link cable. It uses the TI UART code that I wrote so long ago to talk to the Atmega168 in its native tongue. From TI-BASIC I can do 45:Asm(prgmTX) and the number 45 will get sent to the Atmega168. Using some simple commands registers can be set in the emulated SID, and sounds result.

An ancient project. I saw an instructable about making your own CNC like this, and I followed it, but didn’t do it quite right. Spent about $100 on steppers, controllers, and other parts. Turned out that the steppers I got were too weak and my method of connecting them to the threaded rod I was using was very poorly conceived (hot glue and shrink wrap tubing). It looks like it could have worked, but it never did. I did one test where I got it to drill a hole in a piece of wood, but that ended in spectacular failure when the wood caught on fire because I didn’t have the right kind of bit for the Dremel I was using.

Still, was a fun project to attempt. Maybe I’ll try again someday with more success.

Project is one year old from the time I wrote this article about it.

I took ceramics class in my senior year in high school and had a cool teacher who let me flex my creative muscles. She was extremely accommodating. I did this project for my final in her class. It’s a musical instrument inspired by some ceramic pipe percussion instruments that I found on the internet. The midipus has an Arduino inside capable of generating 3 tones at the same time for output to 3 different speakers. There’s one speaker for each “arm”.