Recently, I’ve been learning Kotlin while working on Android apps. While doing this, Kotlin’s heavy use of Lambda functions and comparator parameters began to remind me of functional programming languages like Haskell. Even though Kotlin is an imperative and object oriented language, I wanted to see just how far I could push its functional features […]
While browsing StackOverflow one day I noticed an ad for the “Virtual Circuit World Tour” for something called the AWS DeepRacer League. Not having any idea what that was but thinking it sounded pretty cool, I followed the link. It turns out that the DeepRacer League is Amazon’s autonomous racing league. You train models to […]
At $work I have a motorized sit/stand desk. I have to hold the up/down buttons to go to any height. Clearly, this is far too difficult. So I put together a thing to read the height and use double presses to automatically go to high/low setpoints while keeping single button hold functionality intact a while […]
My early programming experiences could be described as “wandering.” I spent a significant amount of time writing code in the only interpreter I had access to, but rather suddenly jumped off the high-level language cliff to write nothing but x86 assembly and machine code by hand. Being the early days of the internet as we […]
I wanted to select an aviation topic for this Lab Day, and in exploring potential projects found that an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receiver and decoder could be built on a Raspberry Pi with open source software and inexpensive hardware from FlightAware. ADS-B signals are broadcast by all commercial and general aviation aircraft and can […]
While reading links from an article on dotfiles in the first issue of Paged Out I came across a tool I hadn’t seen. I like reading about other people’s tools and their dotfiles, so here are some tools and bash snippets I think are useful. I run a bash shell, with tmux and vim. Tool […]
Minesweeper has always been a fun little game that you can throw up in your free time that still requires a minimum amount of logical problem solving in order to win. During our morning meeting for Lab Day the topic of Minesweeper was brought up so I decided to make an algorithm that tries to […]
The Fourier Series is a method of approximating a periodic function with a sum of sine waves. This was invented as a means to solve the heat equation, which is impossible to derive for most initial conditions save for sine waves. The Fourier Series then could be used to approximate any initial condition as a […]
In Android Studio it is possible define a “Build flavor” to set variables for different configurations of an app. By default there is already 2 build type, release and debug which can be used to store variables but release has certain restrictions preventing it being used for quick debugging. The solution to this is to […]
For my lab day project in December, I decided to try my hand at making an Apple Watch app for our beta DTR app. I followed this tutorial from Ray Wenderlich site, written by Audrey Tam for set up purposes and also to see how to design for the apple watch. Since the watch is […]
