I made a mechanical keyboard! I call it the Ellipsis. This five-pound, way-too-expensive machined aluminum monstrosity was a lot of fun to make, and I wanted to share some thing that I learned along the way.

I’ve spent the past six or so weeks working on a system that can generate realistic, labeled computer vision datasets from virtual scenes. This project was inspired by my time spent working at PFF earlier in the summer, a lot of which centered around creating a simulated testing environment in Gazebo. Access to Gazebo reduced our testing dependencies on the limited amount of prototype robots we had around, and I feel that it was generally helpful. However, I also found that the simulation did not help very much for testing the computer vision aspect of our product, which still relied...

Lately, I’ve been messing around with recording music. I played guitar occasionally when I was younger, and recently started again in order to create a soundtrack for some videos I working on. One thing that really bothered me about recording guitar specifically was that I would always need to take my hands off of the instrument in order to push the record button, then quickly return to playing position. This often meant spending more time pressing buttons to stop and restart recordings than actually playing. To remedy this, I decided to buy a MIDI foot controller for hands-free recording controls....

It’s been about nine months since I finished building my bike, meaning that it’s now experienced all four seasons that New England has to offer. She’s holding up very well, though I’ve started to notice some minor spots of rust here and there.

When I set out to build my bike, I decided to do all the work on the bike with my own hands. This included painting the bike, which I wanted to do mostly with a paint brush instead of spray cans. Painting a bike with a brush is an entirely doable, but tedious, project. I figured I’d document my process and mistakes, so that others may benefit from the lessons I’ve learned.

In this series, I’ll talk about how I painted and built a bike earlier this year. This post will explain how I found the bike frame and prepped it for painting.

This blog post marks the release of my updated website. There’s not much here right now, but I’ll be changing that in the future!