Avik De

Here is a poor-quality GoPro video of my defense:

Part of the reason for the long hiatus from posting is that I’ve been supremely busy with a few things. One of them is that I’ve cofounded a robotics company!

Smokey was with us from at least August till today (we just dropped him off at the PAWS adoption center), and he was really the friendliest cat I’ve ever met.

After dabbling at some boom-assisted steady-state hopping, Jerboa is now trying out transitional behaviors in 3D!

Doing robotics research is one thing, making them presentable and accessible to the public is quite another. I was tasked with engaging high school girls (who were getting a GRASP lab tour for SWE GEARS Day), and I’d guess that keeping their attention through a robot presentation is probably much harder than a conference talk audience’s.

This big guy was going to be put down since he was so aggresive he couldn’t be administered any meds at ACCT. It’s amazing what a loving home will do in two days!

New robot video!

We got her from ACCT (another poor timestamped kitty) the day that poor Marlon passed away. She is a grey kitty with a little white bib, and she likes just having her own corner of her living room where she will hang out on the couch and sleep in awkward poses.

TL;DR: This modified version of stm32loader.py takes extra parameters for EEPROM location and can automatically save and reload EEPROM data when reprogramming the microcontroller!

If you like animals, please adopt and/or foster! PAWS is a great place to start if you live in Philly and aren’t sure how to help. Volunteering is a big help, but fostering is even better since it greatly expands PAWS’s capacity and reach. Here are some things I learned when I started fostering:

To take full advantage of increasingly ubiquitous rapid-prototyping hardware (laser-cutter, 3D printer), you really need to know how to design your hardware in a way that plays to their strengths and weaknesses.

For making balancing robots (disclaimer: not my robot), you certainly need a good sense of the robot’s orientation in the world. I had a disastrous experience a few months ago of trying to use a $1500+ IMU which breaks if your robot moves too fast. Like, 300 degrees/sec, which is nothing for a relatively small, agile robot.

While I certainly wouldn’t call myself an artist, I do enjoy drawing caricatures. After all, who doesn’t want to be famous and cool like Vi Hart? I do, that’s for sure.

This space will have more things in the future. For now, there is an about page with information about me, a fosters page with information about kittens, and other pages for random projects.