Projects

Overview

For lack of a better way of organizing, I've arbitrarily separeted the various projects I've worked on into hardware or software categories. I suppose my definition is that if any hardware is involved, it's on the hardware page, otherwise it's on the software page.

I'm interested in more things than I have time for, and I hope I can list most of them here so I can share experience with people of similar interests.

Interests

• Discrete exterior calculus for 4-dimensional spacetime simulation

  Having taken General Relativity and seen the beauty of general covariance, it seems to me that the proper way of working with physical simulation is to focus on geometry and underlying structure of problems rather than blindly solving differential equations.

• Pathfinding, computational geometry

  Having never been satsified with the state of real time strategy (RTS) games such as Starcraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, etc. I have been thinking about the implementation of such an AI simulation environment. I am most intrigued by the pathfinding problem required for unit movement in these games and how it is possible to do such computations in real time and using a combination of localized and global world data.

• Surface plasmons for optoelectronics

  Having done summer research for two years in a row on this subject, I have learned of what can be done with silicon photonics and optical applications of nanoscience in general. Surface plasmons are an interesting and quite well understood phenomenon, but I believe they could be more widely applied to developing optical applications. I am interested in the problem of more efficient silicon light emission and simulation of such devices.

• FDTD (FreeD2D to be released soon)

  This is my implementation of the finite difference time domain method for computational electrodynamical simulation. It is currently capable of simulating two and three dimensional non dispersive systems. Once absorbing boundary conditions and dispersive capabilities have been added, the code will be released.

• Atomic level simulation

  As we gain more insight into the quantum world, our simulation capabilities must scale accordingly. The bulk material simulations of today will have to be replaced by atomic level simulations of individual atoms and electrons if we are to efficiently develop quantum and nano devices. These efforts are currently limited by our understanding of quantum dynamics and computational abilities to simulate such behavior.

• Ray tracing

  I simply have a small pet project to implement a Snell's law solver (or full ray tracer with coherence effects) since seeing pretty computer simulated ray traced caustics.

• Poisson solver

  This is a relatively simple project that has already been started for simulating static harmonic problems.

• FPGA configuration device

  I'd like to make a generic Flash ROM based FPGA configuration device that can be programmed by USB and from then on will configure the FPGA by itself. This is intimately replated to my USB PIC project.

• Computer-USB interfacing

  Computer interfacing protocols have only gotten more complicated over the years. I'd like to at least understand the de facto peripheral interface right now. A PIC 18Fx550 prototyping board is being used to explore the USB protocol.

• Custom calculator

  I've already implemented this in JavaScript. See the JSCalc under Services. I have no real incentive to turn this into a real binary program since using a web browser is just as easy (if not more convenient).

• 3D Graphing calculator (new release soon)

  I have made a simple 3D graphing calculator due to my dissatisfaction at the current offerings out there. See the Software section if you want to try it out.

• Koenig's eigenfunctions and fractal evolution

  Inspired by the discoveries of Larry Crone, I have made a program to compute and render these functions with fractal properties. Since the main goal is to produce visually appealing ones, I have used this project to explore genetic algorithms by breeding fractal parameters to optimize the appearance of the plotted functions.

• Digital test board

• Nascence, Origins, ???

  Just a M:TG set that I am (was) working on.

• Private network design