avmey

[avmey]

Technische Universität Berlin

I’ve always been advised that if i were to study abroad, to do it the summer after freshman year. Listening to this, I searched which programs the University of Michigan allows students to go to after just their freshman year, and found the TU Berlin program. Knowing I wanted to travel to a popular city in Europe, I knew it was a perfect fit. The only issue was fitting it in with the internship I had already accepted. Through my insistence of going on the study abroad (and a very nice boss), I ended my internship at the start of July so I could travel immediately to Berlin, Germany.

The program I had been accepted into was a German program (3 credits) and a Robotics Seminar (3 credits). The little German I learned has stayed with me, and I can order up a mean döner, a Berlin delicacy. What stuck with me most though was the robotics program.

Our task was to mimic the function of an Amazon Kiva robot. This included the completion of three tasks: • an autonomous line-following algorithm • a manual control function • a warehouse navigation system

Being one of the two people on my team of seven who has coded extensively, I took co-lead on the programming aspect while they worked on optimizing the autonomous driving equations. 

I worked mostly on the python used in our system. The manual control required user input sent from a laptop. This meant we needed to connect the laptop to the m3pi robot using Bluetooth, and send bytearrays to the robot giving directions. I worked on programming the python to receive user input through pygame key press events, translating our driving instructions to binary, and sending the resulting bytearray to the connected robot. I also happened to be the driver for the manual control portion of our project.

I also helped implement the autonomous driving equation into the robot through a C++ code that took in contrast data from sensors on the bottom of the robot that were able to tell where on the line the robot was. Using this data, it executed the autonomous driving equation, which calculated how much the wheel speeds should be adjusted using the magnitude of how off-course the robot currently was. 

Finally, I took lead on designing our system for warehouse navigation. This looked like a bunch of connecting lines on a large sheet of paper, with 6 points on the ends noted as “destinations.” Our robot was required to take in manual input the destinations it was required to hit, go to each individually, and return after each one. The way we handled this system was to have the robot track the number of times it is able to turn down a different path, and to mark at which points it should continue straight, turn left, or turn right to stay on track. When it reached the final destination, it turned around and reverse this path to go back to its starting point. 

In this program, I learned how to work cohesively on a team in which I wasn’t with just programmers, but instead was paired with different types of engineers with varying skillsets. This both puts pressure on you to fulfill your role and responsibility for the execution of your part of the project. In Berlin, which exploring the culture of the country, I also learned python and how to connect via Bluetooth with robots. Overall, an incredible experience I’ll never forget, with people, memories, and knowledge that will stick with me forever.

[avmey]

Girls Code 2017

March 25th marked this semester’s Girls Code, an event in which the Girls in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (GEECS) organization at University of Michigan brings high school aged girls to campus and teaches them basic programming. As an Outreach Officer, I helped plan this event. 

We had over 40 girls come to campus that day. The event included teaching a lesson plan in Processing and a lesson plan with arduinos. I worked on the Processing lesson plan and helped the girls in attendance with any questions that arose. I also was tasked to find a “take home project” for the girls to try when they got home. Finding a Scratch project of recreating the game of Pong, I gave them that assignment and wrote up a document including stretch goals.

The event was extremely successful. It was so nice to share my love of programming with girls who are still deciding what they want to do with their careers. We brought in representatives from Target to host a panel for the attendees to ask them any questions involving working in the industry. 

Next year I plan to become even more involved in this event and apply to be the lead teacher for the Processing lesson plan. I hope to see the girls we taught eventually come to Michigan and even possibly see them major in CS or a similar field!

[avmey]

Website-Building

May I just say outright that there needs to be an easy-to-follow guide on coding your own personal website. The process has been tricky without guidance, not the coding itself but the process of navigating domain purchases and DOS is currently horrid. But, finally, a live website!

I began wanting to create my own website when I started applying for internships during my freshman year. I had played around with HTML and CSS when I was younger, but never to a massive extent. Since beginning to create my website, they’ve come back to me quite easily, for which I am grateful.

The most unintuitive part of the coding itself was the connection between the html and css files and making it so they are matched. Once that was solved, the page selection became much more clear. I’m still looking into how to create subdomains, but don’t have a terrible need for them yet in the design. As the website is fairly simple, using on HTML, CSS, and javaScript in it’s design, I’m able to keep track of all the files using solely the base domain.

As I went for a geometric design, the creation of shapes using CSS turned out to be oddly difficult. Instead of being built in in any sort of way, they are instead comprised of boxes only. I edited the boxes to make the diamonds and rectangles that I use for buttons on the website. This process was interesting as I was able to explore javaScript to rotate the shapes to create the look I wanted.

Another interesting part of the designing process was the color scheme. I decided on the multi-colored pastels. Making sure they looked cohesive was difficult and I contacted my friend majoring in art and design to double check that the colors went well enough together.

Finally, I had a finished website. Unfortunately, I was the only one able to see it.

I then came to face the huge, weird, obtuse thing that is putting content online that isn’t hosted outright by a company or website. I purchased a domain name and had to jump through pages of guide books to realize how to link this new domain with my githubpages hosting of the website. I clicked the final button and, presto, now I’m able to share my work with the world (wide web).

[avmey]

SpartaHacks 2017

I recently attended SpartaHacks 2017, a hackathon put on by Michigan State University. While the event started Friday afternoon, I was only able to get there after midnight. This left my friend and I without a project and looking for something to work on.

He had already had a thought of something we could build in a short amount of time. With us being new to programming, we knew that it couldn’t be something we wouldn’t finish in the weekend, so we settled on making a Chrome extension. 

This sparked discussion of what exact Chrome extension we would want to build. Due to our personal terrible experiences with how websites name their tabs, we decided on a small extension which would allow you to change the name of a currently opened tab, therefore allowing you to give it a name you would recognize more easily.

As I knew HTML and CSS decently well and he had worked before in javaScript, we focused on those areas and dove into the Chrome API. After testing and trying out new things until much-too-early in the morning, we hit a bug that would take us over four hours to solve. 

We needed to add a short line of code to make our script JSON-ifiable. To be quite honest, I’m still not absolute on what exactly the difference would be, but the solving of this issue let’s our  code run correctly.

We were able to finalize the extension, make a logo, and title it Tab Masker. We are working currently to submit it to the Chrome Store. While we were doing our research for the extension, we came across an already existing extension which allows you to edit tab names. After finishing our product, we took a look at the other extension to see how it differed, and found our code to be incredibly shorter and more intuitive to the user.

The weekend was a massive success. As it was my first hackathon, I was able to experience how amazing an environment like that is to a young developer. I’m enormously happy with our finished product, and I cannot wait to be able to point at an extension in the Chrome Store and say, yes, yes I made that.