Category: projects

Backstop Rapid Prototyping

On my single speed bike, I run front and rear brakes. However the frame doesn’t have cable routing bosses on the top tube. Right now I just have the cable housing zip-tied to the frame. This isn’t a very elegant solution and I wanted to improve it.

Problem Solvers makes a nice clamp that will route two cables. Unfortunately they don’t make them to fit my 1.0 inch top tube. Carnegie Mellon has a 3D printer and I had always wanted to experiment with rapid prototyping parts. It is very easy to design a part in Solidworks and then export it to the 3D printer. I thought I could design and fabricate something to fit my need.

backstop_small Versions 1 through 5, left to right. Continue reading “Backstop Rapid Prototyping” →

Past Work: Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access

I never got around to posting about my time at Georgia Tech’s Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA), where I was a researcher and shop manager. CATEA designs and tests all sorts of technology to help disabled people. The entire lab is a sort of skunk works operation; imagine Myth Busters “what crazy thing do you want to try today”. I was responsible for bringing to life the ideas and inventions of several Georgia Tech professors and their grad students. I had an entire shop at my disposal and best of all a Georgia Tech VISA card!

mill

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Desktop Power Supply Hack

I received this wooden tool chest as a bonus for buying some old furniture from an out-of-business machine shop. It was sitting around for a while and I didn’t know what to do with it. I had the idea that it would be cool for something and, in full pack-rat mentality, I’d hung on to it for several years.

A fair amount of my recent projects have been what you might call stupidly-attentive-to-detail. I’ve usually obsessed about having every wire cut to length and soldered perfectly. I have delayed a project while I waited for that one perfect $2.00 part to arrive in the mail. I realized this was queuing up my project list and creating quite a bit of frustration. I was actually not getting any enjoyment from side projects. So, I decided to have a little hack project and get something running in a single evening.

woodenbox1

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American Sign Language Recognition System

[iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/55812802″]

This project was part of my Carnegie Mellon University graduate coursework. The project spanned two courses: Computer Vision and Machine Learning. I worked in a team with Justin Farrell and Matt Eicholtz. Our Matlab code is available on my GitHub page. Feel free to use it and take what you need. If you do we only ask that you reference our efforts (and the effort of those who we relied on). You can get some more information from our poster.

Poster
GitHub repository
Paper (for Machine Learning course)