The Other Andy Grove

It’s great to see that some students at Georgia Tech made their own version of my Ultrasonic Pi Piano design. They documented their build here. I really like the curved design of the enclosure that they came up with to minimize interference between sensors.

I’ve recently been experimenting with a couple of Wyzecam cameras and have been recommending them to friends, family, and neighbors ever since and everyone seems really happy with them so I figured I’d try and spread the word further and write up a proper review.

Several months after creating the Ultrasonic Pi Piano prototype, I have now designed an enclosure for it. The design is very simple but it means that this project is now packaged up and complete.

So this is what happens when your fun hobby project gets featured on Hackaday. I guess I've had my 5 minutes of fame and now I have gone back to obscurity. It's interesting to note that this traffic spike to my YouTube videos only netted me a couple of bucks in revenue so I'm still several years away from receiving my first $100 payout. I'd better not quit the day job just yet!

I have been working on a fun project to make an exhibit for my local makerspace to take to events. I had a ton of spare ultrasonic sensors lying around so I decided to experiment with turning them into a musical instrument using a Raspberry Pi running a software synth.

Here are the slides from my talk earlier this week at the Denver/Boulder Rust Meetup. I had a ton of fun putting this project together over a four week period and I would encourage others to try their hands at embedded projects with the Raspberry Pi and the Rust programming language. The source code is open source and available here.

We were unable to compete at Sparkfun AVC at all this year due to issues with our compass. Things were working pretty well during practice the day before although the compass was off by about 10 degrees on the run to the first corner. Here's a video from practice which demonstrates obstacle avoidance kicking in when the vehicle was drifting too close to the hay bales.

After two pretty intense weekends of learning more about Rust, I now have the new autonomous vehicle basically working. We took it for the very first test run last night and here's the video as captured and instrumented by the Rust code:

I very recently started using the Rust programming language professionally and although I am still working my way through the learning curve, I feel that I am proficient enough to "get it done" even if it isn't using the most idiomatic Rust code. I'm enjoying the language immensely and have been spending evenings and weekends challenging myself to solve various problems in Rust.

In the weeks leading up to the Denver Maker Faire, I decided to design a case to hold an Arduino and the voice changer shield that I had designed. I wanted to make it easy for people to have a go at talking like a Dalek. It turned out to be a huge success!