Well, I finally have gotten around to posting about my current project, Sagar! (The name might be changed if i come up with a better one) Basically, in an effort to better understand the technology I use at my job in the Navy, I am building a robot from scratch. My hope is in the end to have a robot that can be driven remotely, or drive itself with the aid of a GPS and inertial navigation system as well as avoid obstacles and reroute around them. I want it to be able to ‘record’ a route while being driven remotely, then be able to ‘replay’ the path without any assistance.

A bad video of the new Lab Coat. I rewrote the PWM code after this and the fades are more smooth. Better video coming soon.

Just before I went to college I was given an Xbox as a gift and was finally introduced to the world of Halo. However, I was quickly bored with the game and didn’t have much use for the Xbox, until I found out about the new phenomenon of Xbox moding.

For a while in college I had an aging Ask Proxima projector I used in my living room. I got it for a steal on ebay because it had a broken lens. I was able to correct the lens problem and it worked beautifully for a year. Then suddenly, it refused to stay on.

I don’t like throwing things away, so when I got some free time, I decided to take a look at it. What I discovered by process of elimination was that the power supply for the onboard electronics had gone bad. There was no way to order a new one as this was a 10 year old projector. So I decided on something different.

The LED flower is about the closest I have been to being and artist. One day I just had the motivation to build something artistic. I took a wire hanger and bent it into a shape of a self-standing flower. Cut up a milk jug to make the leaves and petals and glued a LED to each piece of plastic. I built a circuit on protoboard and installed it as the center of the flower. The circuit I designed uses a photodiode to turn a transistor on or off so that the LEDs are only on when the room is dark. The whole flower runs off two AAs but I soon hope to add a wall transformer to it.

Here is the video of my Senior Design Robot. It would have won the 2009 IEEE SouthEast Con if it went, as it beats the robot that did win during every practice run.