Projects

I work on projects from time to time, and try to post about them here. If you learn something, that’s great. If you are inspired, that’s even better. Half the motivation to write up information about my projects is to force myself to think/build clearly.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Please be aware, unlike my Ramblings, these projects are living documents. I may update them without notice to add detail or track changes to the projects themselves.

• Epic UI

  I used to be an avid World of Warcraft player, raiding bosses many times a week with my guild. In order to get the most out of my own performance I forked an advanced UI replacement addon named Tukui into my own project, I named Epic UI (after my gamertag, Epicgrim).

• Freqk Display (7 band audio EQ)

  I own a Korg MS-20 Mini, and have been using it to learn a bit more about music and signal generation. It has configurable oscilators, envelopes, and filters. The primary way we interact with sound is with our ears, but electronic tools can also be made to “hear” and then display that information visually. I’ve built an LED display (on top of the synth) to visualize the intensity of 7 frequency bands (4 LEDs) of our audible spectrum, log scale.

• The λ-calculus

  λ-calculus one of the most fundamental programing languages, being made up of only three primative types of objects. It’s the basis for functional programming, and is just as powerful as any other programming language. I’ve created a parser and reducer for this language which, for example, will reduce (λx.x) 1 to 1. In addition to a parser, which consumes arbitrary text, a set of Rust macros: var!, abs! (λ!), and app! (γ!) are provided.

• Avrm

  I write a decent bit of code for AVRs, those tiny little processors that power the Arduino platform. As I was learning I found I wanted less and less of the functionality of Arduino itself, and could trade the substancial overhead for a minimal library I’ve named AVRM. This library now powers a few other firmware libraries I’ve written over the years.

• Clock

  Clocks have been a large motivator in the world of information technology. With better and better clocks becoming readily avalible. These days we take network syncroniced clocks for granted. This project is an attempt to build a fully functional clock.

• Game Of Life

  Conway’s Game of Life is a cult classic amungst programmers. It’s a beautiful algorithm to watch, yet is defined by very simple rules. There are a few interesting design decisions that must be made by any functioning display of the game. Here I’ve implemented life on a 32x32 LED grid, powered by a (ARM) Teensy 3.1.

• Led Cube

  I’ve wanted to build an LED cube for a while now, and I finnally did. This project was my first experiance etching a PCB, as well as a great feat of soldering. The result is an 8x8x8 red LED cube of my own design.

• Maze Gl

  A friend of mine once asked if we could build something in OpenGL just to see how that all works. We began enthusiastically making a 3D maze which you could run around in.

• Parser Combinator

  Lexers and Parsers are at the core of every language. The main goal is to turn a stream of text into something structured and spesific to the language at hand. Here I show how the parser library I wrote works by combining small parsers into larger ones with only a few kinds of combinators.

• Quadcopter

  Quadcopters are amazing flying devices, able to move somewhat freely in our three spacial dimensions. Here I’m building a quadcopter from scratch, meaning all my own electronics and software. The end goal is to have a fully controlable, and semi-autonomus flying drone (yes with a camera).