Blogging, I’ve missed you so.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site. I have done so much in the last year that I have told myself that I need to just sit down and crank out information about it. That’s great in theory, but the amount of time I would need to have spent writing about things that have already happened keep me from making progress on my current projects.

Therefore, this will not be the all inclusive post with tons of details, pictures, and step by step instructions on how to recreate my projects that I wanted it to be. Instead it will be a short recap with some minimal information. If you really want to know more about a project, let me know what you are looking for and I can probably oblige specific requests.

Anyways, I get calls fairly often from potential employers who ask me if I’m free for work since my latest blog post is from my last day as an intern during the summer of 2010. I guess I was unaware how often my blog was read for information about my current status in life. To all of you who may be possible employers… *wave*.

Since my internship was over, I have revisted a lot of old interests and projects, and played with new things I couldn’t have imagined getting the opportunity to play with.

Firstly, I was a TA at the University of Washington for the web programming class. Pretty straight forward, we taught the whole stack from mysql backend, php, css, and javascript frontend. I led quiz sections, graded homework, office hours, etc. The regular shindig. I love web programming so much, so passing this knowledge on was an awesome experience.

I’ve also been revisiting my computer controlled light tubes project. The first version is quite large and clunky, the wires are massive and inflexible and it’s time for it to be expanded. I learned a lot from making the initial version, I had never really worked with hardware before and did everything from the soldering to the firmware and highlevel c# controller. My new version will be 1 printed circuit board, slightly larger than a credit card’s dimensions (excluding the height obviously) instead of 4 hand soldered boards. I’m designing the schematic and am planning to send those out for manufacturing. It’s a big undertaking and is something I’ve never done before.

I’ve also been working on building new letters for the outside of my Fraternity’s chapter at the University of Washington. Our current letters are brass and blend in with the side of our building and are almost invisible at night. Some houses have purchased back lit letters for their house. These turn on at night and turn off in the morning and are backlit in white. I decided to take the whole concept one step farther and to do something I have never seen someone do before. I made new letters for our house (didn’t buy them or hire someone to cut them), and attached an rgb led strip to the back. I made a custom controller that turns on and off the led strip to a solid color at night and in the morning just like all the others. However, you can plug a computer into it and run animations to your heart’s content. If you unplug the computer, the solid color that turns on at night will be the last color the computer set them to.

I laser cut the letters from acrylic, painted them with silver automobile paint and a clear coat, drilled and tapped holes to attach studs, wired up the led strips, and made the circuit controller. To give you a sense of size, the outside oval of the Theta is 18 inches across and the studs holding up the letters are 4 inches long.

And during all this, I have also been working at Microsoft full time since January. I’m working on an amazing project called Mayhem that has the potential to revolutionize what normal people (non developers) can use their computer for. I have so much more to say about that, and I’m able to as well! The entire project is public and open source, so stand by for more information.

As I said, I don’t have time to go as depth in all these projects as I would like to, but I have taken this opportunity to at least provide some summary of what I’m working on. Hopefully I’ll approach writing articles in more managable chunks and can actually keep this up. I feel like I always say that. Hmm.