Projects

Many links on this page point at my old blog. All material has been mirrored to the new host, and added or edited links are at pappp.net, but old links still point to the .engr.uky.edu address.

This page is a rough index of projects I’ve posted on, past, present, and future, to expedite digging for them when I want to show them off. There isn’t really an order to these; most of them are “spare time” projects, some of which drag on in the background for years. This does not cover my projects related to Cooking and food. Also note that updates to this page are intermittent, so there is often fresh stuff from the front page not mentioned here.

* I ran an Embedded Systems Unit as the TA for EGR199 “Creativity and Design in Electrical & Computer Engineering” in the Fall 2011 semester that I’m pretty pleased with.

* The big project of late has been my Masters project, writing a compiler to target a LAR-based architecture. This has involved a lot of swearing at LLVM.
My Explination when I was picking up the project.
The Post where I explain the decision to use LLVM. Months later, I understand just how oversold it is. At least it isn’t GCC.
A Publication on the project., “A Compiler Target Model for Line Associative Registers”, presented at Compilers for Parallel Computing 2010 in Vienna, Austria.
A direction change when it became clear that LLVM’s design was unsuitable to finish the project with.

* I’ve started building a DIY CNC machine, to learn about fabrication, metalworking, mechatronics, machining, and lots of other skills I’d like to have but have never had a chance to develop. Progress comes in fits and spurts in my sorely limited spare time.
This Post announces the project.
This Post is about some of the early steps.
This Post has some more notes on electronic parts.
This Post is about the current drive nuts.
This Post has details from the last time I had time to play with it, and packages up the details up to roughly working 2-axis motion. Need to redesign some parts before continuing.

* I wrote some programs to automatically prettyprint a codebase at a rate a programmer can watch. One was good enough to use on the show floor, but I really want something fancier.

* Some Robotic Car Chassis I designed for the EE281: Logical Design Laboratory at the University of Kentucky. Most of the details are here.

* I took a quick pass at building a Spiffchorder to play with chording keyboards and the V-USB stack for AVR microcontrollers. After a couple months of not having time to finish, I’ve had some success with it, but still need to find some time to work on physical design. After some idle time, it needed to be evicted from the breadboard and built properly, so I have a reasonably well made circuit with connector, even if I haven’t built decent key sets/gloves/etc. for it.

* I did a large fraction of the design and fabrication for a pair of Musical Bourbon Barrels. This was a project with Collexion to be auctioned to raise money for some good causes.

* Some details on a Small Cluster I wired up from components the research group inherited. This is far from the first cluster I’ve wired, and I seriously doubt it will be the last. Eventually it will probably be moved into the ECE student lounge for student use, but no one has quite gotten to finishing the job. It has been booted (CAOS/Perseus system) sans the nodes that need recapping, and the caps are sitting with it, but that is an experienced-fabricator-only project… maybe during winter break?

* A quick-and-dirty DIY Molex Y-Cable I built from a dead motherboard and two dead PSUs to prove feasibility for HAK the Half-Powered Athlon cluster in Kentucky.

* A stupid little awk script I wrote for accounting total user time logged in on any UNIX-like system.

* I cracked open a Little USB button advertisement to reverse-engineer it. The external EEPROM later had a chat with a bus pirate, but I’ve never reverse engineered it well enough for even string substitution.

* I’ve been playing with an idea I call SmartLEDs for a while. a couple pieces of hardware exist, but I’ve never been able to give it enough attention.

* One of the robots I worked on with the University of Kentucky’s IEEE Robotics Team. I was more involved with the previous years’, but that was pre-blog.

* I’ve been iterating on designs for a pocket organizer. That post is about V1, which I carried for about a year. V2 is a similar design made of upholstery fabric, that I need to get a post up about.

* An occasionally updated collection of ideas to hack on later.

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