From The Lab
Plane Spotting with ADS-B
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) messages are broadcast by all commercial aircraft and can be read by the public with a capable antennae and decoder. ADS-B acts as a “next-gen” RADAR, capable of 12x higher frequency and 150 nautical mile (approx 172 miles) range. Decoding a message Information: https://mode-s.org/decode/adsb/introduction.html An ADS-B message is 112 bits long, […]
Tool recommendations and Bash Snippets
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 solver
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 […]
Using the Fourier Series to Draw SVG Images.
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 […]
Using Build Configs to Change Variables in Android Studio
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 […]
First Apple Watch App!
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 […]
Automatic Price Detection from a Product Page
I love finding deals online and have been thinking a lot about how to monitor sites during this holiday season. The past few months I’ve been playing around with Google Chrome Puppeteer and thought it would be fun to use for a lab day to see what I could build around price monitoring. While doing […]
Playing the Blues by the Skin of your Teeth
The Problem While working on projects around our house, my wife Emily and I listen to music using our esteemed Bluetooth speaker. Often times, though, our quest takes us into different rooms of the house, as I emphasize to Emily the importance of parallelization for optimizing workloads. Two eye-rolls later, and at least one of […]
Procedurally Generated Art from Perlin Noise
I’ve been really interested in procedural generation after seeing all the things it can create. A month before this, on the previous lab day, Andy used a noise function to procedurally generate a heightmap in order to create a landmass. He left off saying he wanted to try to add rivers. So I thought I’d give […]
Building an FM/RBDS Transmitter using a RasPi Zero
I find it amusing that in this era of abundant personal electronic communication tools, “everyone” still wants to be a broadcaster. More specifically, an FM broadcaster. This belief stems from observing the intense competition in recent years for FCC-issued Low Power FM broadcast licenses in local communities, and more empirically, from my Internet searches to […]
