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Richie's Blog

Post 4

What Has Happened Since Post 3?

It has been almost half a year since I’ve lasted posted (did not accomplish the mid-winter break post sadly), but that means there is alot to be updated on! With most of my final projects requiring some form of programming, I have been able to apply my knowledge in a multitude of fields. So heres a quick rundown of what I have been working on since my last post.

What Have I Been Working On?

Robotics

With this year being my final season of being on StuyPulse Team 694, there was a multitude of projects I worked on during this build and competition season this year. For the uninitiated, StuyPulse is part of the FIRST Robotics Competition, a global robotics community that builds robots to compete an annual game, but it is so much more than that. The friends, community, and soft skills I’ve picked up in my three years on this team has been invaluable to my growth as a person.

This season, I worked as one of the senior programmers for Izzi, our competition robot. Being initially responsible for the swerve drivetrain and LED subsystems during the build season. (see here for what a swerve drive is). To me, the swerve drivetrain has been one of the more challenging programming hurdles, far greater then the traditional tank drive. The swerve drive requires a much more complex control system, with the need to control both the rotation and translation of the robot. I am especially proud of the alignment code, which used both our vision code as well as some trigonometric calculations for simplifying the driver’s job when it comes to specific tasks.

As the season progressed, and much of the codebase matured, my tasks become smaller, side projects, but they were honestly my favorite things to work on. Heres a list of some of them:

  • LED Subsystem: An entire overhaul of our LED subsystem, which used an addressable LED strip to display robot states and information to the drivers. (shame we used a shorter strip so we couldn’t use the odometry feature in LEDAlign.java)

  • Dynamic and Ferry Autons: As Izzi’s capabilities grew and the season progressed, so did the complexity of our autonomous routines. Once we realized that this season’s meta was the ferrying strategy, we created ferry autos and dynamic autos that could adapt to the centerline pieces being present or not. This was my personal favorite feature to work on, and I hope the team could expand it in the future.

  • PulseCrewPrep: A project I started to help the team’s efforts in PulseCrew, our “tech-support” efforts for other teams who are running in issues during the competition. As many teams would show up without code, this project was designed to help teams get their robots running as quickly as possible, with code templates for common mechanisms and hardware.

  • Kitbot: The Kitbot is a starter bot provided by FIRST for newer teams to get a head start on their robot. This was a project in which I rewrote the template code provided in the team’s style as well as adding additional features that would make the robot more competitive. (e.g. vision, autos, better control algorithms)

  • there were also other projects such as robot vision detection with convolutional neural networks, ROS integration, and a turret subsystem towards the end of the season, as you can see I was quite busy this season.

Now that the season has ended, I am excited to see how the team will grow in the future. I’m not sure if I will be immediately involved with FIRST next year as a mentor, but maybe I could be a CSA in the future!

Physics Demos and Projects

AP Physics C, my achilles heel. It has been a struggle of mine the entire year as I try to keep up with the class. But one of the things I enjoyed the most from the class was the labs and projects we did. But some new projects I did this year were an electric field simulation and a brushless motor simulation. Both were done in Python, with the electric field graph visualization with matplotlib and the brushless motor simulation using vpython. I will be posting these projects on my GitHub soon, so stay tuned! I think these projects are a great way to demonstrate knowledge in physics and programming, and I hope to do more in the future.

Presentation of Foo Food Fighters

June 18th was the final presentation day of my Google mentorship project. This was honestly one of my most fun and complete side projects, using the multitude of skills and experiences I’ve picked up over the years. Using CV from robotics, ML from my last project, and fullstack development from my time at XCave, I was able to create a fully functional web app that could detect food items from a photos, text, or a live camera feed and return correct nutritional information in order to aid someone’s nutritional needs. I was able to present this project to a panel of Google engineers, and even was able to visit the Google office in NYC! I am very thankful for my mentor, Anthony Lui, for guiding us through the project and helping us learn so much.

Cybersecurity

Having taken a cybersecurity course this year, I have been able to learn a lot about the field and its applications. I am so happy to have been exposed to a whole field of computer science that I had never even thought about before. Working with tools like hydra, nmap, gobuster, etc, has provided real-world applications in my daily life. My final project in the course was recreating the AES encryption algorithm that is the global standard for transmitting information on the internet. My favorite memory involving using the knowledge from cybersecurity was getting the wifi password of semi-public (“public” but password protected) wifi networks in my neighborhood. I hope to continue learning more about cybersecurity in the future, especially in college.

What Am I Planning to Work On?

After that long rant on my projects over the last few months, I think you can guess that I’m fairly exhausted. But that doesn’t mean no code will be written this summer. While I don’t plan on starting any new projects, I do plan on continuing/ expanding prior projects I’ve worked on.

Farewell

I plan on visiting Europe this summer, hoping to hit Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. After that it will be working some summer jobs until I head off to college. I plan on updating you guys on my projects right before I go off to college, so stay tuned! Until then, peace!