Projects and Space Things

[alexkarantza]

Astro clock

My latest completed project has been my Astro Clock. A simulator can be found here. This is a 24 hour clock that tells the time by showing the sun traveling around the face. This is not a solar clock, however. When the sun is at the very top, it is noon local time. Sunrise and sunset are indicated by the horizon lines visible during the day (meaning that during daylight savings time, the horizon is tilted!) The planets are also visible, roughly corresponding to their positions along the ecliptic.

After making the simulator, I actually built a real clock, with 60 RGB LEDs, running the same code (well, almost the same code. It also has a mode where it just shows regular 12h clock hands.) It’s currently hanging up at my parent’s place. The hardware consists of the LEDs, a real time clock, and an Atmega processor; you could easily replicate this with an Arduino. I’ll post the code on GitHub at some point...

[alexkarantza]

Astrophotography Gallery Map

This was a little html/js/php program I was fiddling around with to see if I could get a visual gallery for all the photos I take of space – a view of the entire sky, with links to each photo on the map showing which region of the sky is in the photo itself.

It is actually very difficult to draw a rectangle projected onto a spherical sky projected back into a rectangular plane. It is, however, a neat piece of code that loads in some text files to populate a starmap with stars, messier objects, planet/moon locations…

[alexkarantza]

Wires & Traces

This was a project I wrote in a 24 hour hackathon, out of dissatisfaction with the current state of electronics simulator and PCB layout software. Wires is a small html/javascript app that lets you place “components” on a schematic and wire them up. It’ll build a netlist, which could eventually be used for simulation, or layout. Traces is a very similar app that shares much of the same code, but is designed to take that netlist and lay out the physical components in a way that you could then print as a PCB.

It’s an interesting proof of concept and I’d love for someone to actually implement this fully…

[alexkarantza]

"Smarter Compositing with the Kinect"

As a project for this CS Grad Elective, I decided to explore what could be done using the Kinect. I had seen plenty of neat projects in the field of augmented reality – compositing in synthetic objects to real scenes – but all the ones that used the Kinect seemed to lack believability. My goal was to apply techniques I knew from Computer Graphics to try and improve the appearance of kinect-based augmented reality, and more importantly to build a simple, fast framework to do the processing on the GPU.

Presentation (pdf)

Whitepaper (pdf)

Youtube: Synthetic Lighting

Youtube: Interactivity (Stargate Demo)

[alexkarantza]

Swarm of Tiny Autonomous Robots

My Senior Design Project for the Computer Engineering BS degree involved designing and manufacturing, from the ground up, half a dozen palm-sized robots meant to demonstrate and develop decentralized swarm intelligence algorithms. For our presentation, we implemented several little games that the robots play with eachother. This project not only won a sponsor award at the 2011 Imagine RIT fair, but also was awarded first place in the IEEE Student Design Competition.

The hull was designed, vacuformed, and assembled by hand; I also designed the circuit board, and again hand-soldered each. The robots run on an Atmega processor. The software handles connecting to the radio and creating a decentralized, self-healing wireless network. It also runs a virtual machine, interpreting a custom bytecode language that implements the robot’s behavior, which allows us to reprogram them wirelessly in the field.

My teammates were Rob LiVolsi, who is responsible for the networking algorithm, the mechanical design and manufacture, and some of the software; and Matt Keller, who was responsible for the programmer and simulator, including the VM, as well as handling lots of documentation. I was mostly responsible for the electronics, radio, and microcontroller programming.

[alexkarantza]

Voxel Game Engine

To be honest, this project started because I was complaining about Minecraft, and someone told me, “I don’t see you making a better one.” So I decided to make a better one. Making game engines from the ground up is challenging, fun, and I always learn something. The friends I’ve been working with on the project have ideas in mind for actual gameplay to accompany it later, but it may or may not ever be released as a finished game. We have released a “pre-alpha” demo to the community on the Ars Technica forums, however, with encouraging response. It is programmed in C++, using libraries such as Ogre3D, irrKlang, and Lua.

[alexkarantza]

Yet Another (First-Person) Spaceship Game

This was a neat experiment; I wanted to write a proof of concept for an engine that could maintain the precision of a first-person game, as well as storing coordinates on a scale of thousands of light years. And be able to do physics – both ordinary rigid-body physics for a first-person game, as well as orbital mechanics – seamlessly. Using a 3d integer grid, I essentially break the galaxy up into mere kilometer-sized chunks. Some modifications in the physics and rendering engines allow them to use these new coordinates, so that all the floating point errors are delayed until coordinates are in player-space, and therefore unnoticable. As it stands, the engine places you in the cockpit of a little shuttlecraft in orbit of an Earth-sized moon of a clarified jovian gas giant. With rings that look suspiciously like Saturn’s. You can walk around the shuttle as it flies, or step out the back and float through space on your own.

In addition to the physics features I played with (which were eventually incorporated into the Voxel game mentioned in the next post, allowing recklessly limitless terrain generation) this also gave me the opportunity to write shaders to do accurate atmospheric scattering. If you position yourself on the night side of a planet’s terminator, you can see a more-or-less accurately colored sunset :) Speaking of planets, the moon has a solid surface (perturbed by perlin noise) that subdivides as you approach it; another tactic I eventually applied to the Voxels engine.

[alexkarantza]

Panorama Stitching Project

For my Intro to Computer Vision class, I decided to try and implement a panorama stitching algorithm using SIFT feature points, as described in the paper by Brown and Lowe. It was implemented entirely in MATLAB, and worked quite well given the time limits of the class.

Presentation (pdf)

Whitepaper (pdf)

[alexkarantza]

Yet Another (Tactical) Spaceship Game

This was a quick project I threw together inspired by Artemis, a nifty co-op game where you and your friends pilot a spaceship together, each having a different “bridge console” available on their laptop. I made this mostly because I was dying to do a project in C#, and make interfaces in OpenGL. For only working on it a few days, I made some decent progress; a ship that flies around, some AI ships to shoot at, not-too-shabby warp speed particle effects and a user interface that has absolutely nothing at all to do with any popular sci-fi series owned by MGM.

I might revisit this at some point... watching this video after a few years has reminded me of how cool it is >_>