Half-Baked Plans

Harebrained Ideas

There are a lot of areas of engineering that I'd like to learn more about by building stuff. Here are a few of the many harebrained ideas that I have floating around in my head.

Automated room control via gestures

A few of my friends have "automated" their dorm rooms at MIT. I found this concept interesting, but I never had time to make one of my own. Since I'm only in my room for one more semester, it's kind of pointless to build one for a few months. But, when I move into my next location, I'm planning to build one.

One of the main things I am looking forward to working on (and something I haven't seen before) is gesture recognition that seamlessly integrates my daily activities with control of the system. As a simple example, when I walk into my room wearing my headphones and take them off, if I point them toward my stereo, my computer should recognize which track I'm playing (by communicating with my phone) and continue it where my phone left off.

I have lots of ideas for things to control, such as my window shades, lights, door lock, etc. I'm looking to use a combination of RFID readers, IMUs, and webcam-based gesture recognition with OpenCV.

Plasma Speaker

I want to build one just so I can say I did.

FPGA-based audio analysis

FPGAs allow you to build great signal processing devices. In fact, my master's thesis is in signal processing on FPGAs. I'm interested in using them for audio analysis.

EL plates with ITO

Boy, I wish I could get some ITO (Indium Tin Oxide). It's a transparent, conductive material, but it's also hard to obtain. If I could, I'd coat some thin plastic sheets with it and then the other sides with some phosphor used in EL wire. I could make EL plates maybe? :)

EL stuff with conductive thread

I wonder if you could use conductive thread in a mesh to produce some kind of EL clothlike product. I'm really interested in learning more about EL stuff.

Hardware-based USB encryption

USB is a mess. Really, it is. I looked at the spec once and couldn't sleep for weeks. I wonder if it would be possible, though, to do high-speed encryption with stream ciphers so that endpoints don't see anything more than a little latency.

Bracket-style syntax for python

I hate Python's indent-based sytax; I'd much rather be able to have if () {}. I'm sorry, but making syntax indentation-dependent is pretty stupid. So, I'd like to do two things. First, build a script that reads a bracket syntax file and converts it to something Python can understand. Then, I'd like to patch Python so it would support bracket-style syntaxes directly.

Disable back/forward buttons for firefox

The thumb buttons (buttons 8 and 9) are hard-coded in Firefox to go back and forward, but I hate this feature, since I like to use those buttons with my window manager. The task of rummaging through the monstrosity of Firefox code is daunting, though.