Blog

A couple months ago I wrote and published my first public blog post for work! It took a lot of effort to massage my rough draft into the final piece and I’m super grateful for the editing, proofreading, and general writing tips and feedback from Joe, Matt, and Dan.

Running a hackathon is a lot of work. A lot of logistics, a lot of people. A lot of headaches that can be solved with… wait for it… technology. We’ve been to hackathons, we know how to build web-apps, why not try solving some of those headaches?

We gathered outside at some ungodly hour of the morning, shivering and weighed down by backpacks. Soon we’d be on our way to Durham, North Carolina for HackDuke, a hackathon unlike any other I’d attended. Instead of the usual anything-goes hackathon event, HackDuke’s theme of “Code for Good” encouraged participants to create projects that benefited society.

I won the 18 and under award in the “People in Nature” category of Mass Audubon Society’s 2014 photo contest! The photo, along with other winners, can be found at Mass Audubon.

In late October we (Michael, Nick and I) saw a post on the GTHackers group on Facebook promoting HackNashville. Almost as a spur of the moment decision, we all signed up and less than a month later we were on a van to Nashville. This is what we did.

A couple months ago (April 2014) I found and contributed to a project on Github that scraped government websites for otherwise obscure reports and downloads them in an (hopefully) organized fashion.

This week I’ve worked on a lot of the programming for my project. Most of the navigation and localization code for my project. The problem is that I haven’t had a chance to test the logic on the car itself… so bugs are just waiting to happen. I need to add more mundane code pertaining to debugging and logging information to help me figure out what went wrong when it doesn’t work.

This past week I’ve done a lot more of the coding for my project as well as refining and fixing some of the circuitry and mechanics of the car.

This week I continued testing and fixing some of the problems from last week as well as adding to my main board and finalizing the code for driving. I’m pretty much finishing as much of the work as I can before I start untethering the car.

This past week I have started the work to untether my car from the workbench (power supply and breadboards). I started by moving the motor and servo controllers to perfboards and soldering them in place, taking them off the breadboard. I also started implementing the GPS localization algorithms and experimented with KML and generating maps.

I’ve “finished” a “functional” rc car, basically rebuilding the toy car I took apart months earlier but with in a more fine tuned but limited fashion. Currently it can drive (servo steering and motor control) under the direction of an Xbox 360 controller but it’s total range of motion is ~7 inches since it is still tethered to the power supply (and Beaglebone-USB-Computer).

Yesterday (Feb 22) was the Blueprint Hackathon hosted at Google Cambridge. Team mmmYEP created crapfinder, a web page that serves up amusing curated shopping results based on a how much a customer wanted to spend.