Well, this was my plan – to create an extremely simple virtual piano with Lego Mindstorms, just by using the ultrasonic sensor in the manner below: To play the correct frequency for the detected key, I first tried a ladder if-then-else within the Mindstorms visual programming environment, and it absolutely tanked! For every if-then-else path, … more
I wanted to create a robot that can draw something on a paper. Searching for some inspirations, I found on YouTube, a variety of very amazing and cool implementations. Yet, they all drew on a horizontal plane, and were mechanically complex. I wanted something that I could mount on my son’s easel, and draw like … more
Last weekend we walked into Fry’s to find an awesome deal for Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0. Mindstorms is a robotics system for kids 10+ years, and it comes with 3 servo motors and 4 sensors (1 ultrasonic sensor, 1 color sensor and 2 touch sensors), and a wide variety of Lego technic pieces. I had … more
Recently I found that a WebGL program I wrote earlier was not working anymore due to CORS restriction. To get around this, I wrote up an extremely simple proxy using node.js and hosted it on the amazing nodester service. You can access the service like this: http://corsproxy.nodester.com/?src=<image url> It just fetches the data from remote … more
Electronics used to be my hobby while I was growing up, and one of the components that always fascinated me was the seven segment display. So when I wanted to get my feet wet on YUI 3 couple of weeks ago, I thought how cool would it be to develop a widget that renders a … more
With your support for Let It Snow! application, we were able to raise USD 750 for Myrtle! This will go a long way in supporting the educational expenses of many underprivileged kids, and also raise HIV/AIDS awareness in rural Chennai. Thank you, thank you! Also, the number of application downloads is 1042 as of today. … more
v1.0 Do you live near the Tropics and wish you had snow? or live in the Northern hemisphere and had enough of it? Don’t worry, this application will let you enjoy falling snow within the comforts of your home on your Android powered phone. Let it Snow! is a fun Android application for the Christmas … more
I’m very happy to have reached level 2 in Project Euler by solving my 50th problem last week! It was problem #55, counting the number of Lychrel numbers less than 10000. Although I had a goal of reaching level 3 this year, I’m glad I could reach 2nd level by end of this year. I … more
When written in the form mm/dd/yy, we get only 12 such dates in a century! The odds of seeing such dates this century is 12/36525 = 0.033%. Also, the odds are so much skewed towards the earlier part of the century. Another interesting fact about last such date – On 08/08/08, the Chinese decided to … more
On the 12th June, 2009