Jason Wright

HelioWatcher (spring 2012)

Jason Wright — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:13:48 +0000

The HelioWatcher is a solar tracking & analytics platform, capable of orientating a solar panel towards the position of maximum efficiency and performing long-term data logging to analyze optimal positioning. Developed with Jeremy Blum for Cornell’s ECE 4760.

Source Code

Available on GitHub.

Hacking the PopShop (spring 2012)

Jason Wright — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:56:15 +0000

Jeremy Blum, Sam Sinensky and I turned a whiteboard into a tactile control panel for the lights and music in the PopShop, a new co-working/entrepreneurial space at Cornell University. This was our entry for the 2012 Cornell Hackathon, sponsored by Moat, Big Red Venture Fund, DFJ Gotham Ventures, the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club, and Graduate Professional Student Assembly. It was designed and built entirely over the course of a 16-hour all-nighter. Since the hackathon had no restrictions on what the entry could look like (basically, hack together something cool in a short amount of time), we decided to hack the venue of the hackathon itself.

Using an Axis network camera, MATLAB, an Arduino-controlled relay, and a server written in Python, our project allows PopShop visitors to turn the lights on/off and control the music by moving 3D-printed objects around on the table. “Hack the PopShop” won 1st place.

Video

Code

On GitHub.

Using NMEAP on an 8-bit ATmega

Jason Wright — Tue, 01 May 2012 08:16:06 +0000

I’ve been using the NMEAP library by David Howard for parsing GPS sentences for an ECE 4760 project with an ATmega 1280. It’s a wonderful library, but it runs into problems decoding UTC timestamps on 8-bit architectures like the 1280. I found a fix and thought I would share.

In the function:

int nmeap_gpgga(nmeap_context_t *context,nmeap_sentence_t *sentence)

Replace:

gga->time = atoi(context->token[1]);

with:

sscanf(context->token[1], "%"SCNu32, &gga->time);

What’s basically happening is that the AVR implementation of atoi will overflow UTC times past 6:55:36 on 8-bit architectures. (Since I was working on this during an all-nighter, the fact that my code stopped working at 7 AM was quite annoying.) You have to use sscanf to specify a 32-bit result — even though gga->time is already defined as a long, the definition of long varies based on the architecture. The best way to be sure is to look at AVR\inttypes.h and use something like int32_t in your own code. Hope this helps.

National Geothermal Student Competition!

Jason Wright — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:46:55 +0000

Several fellow CUSD students and I won a $10K award from the Department of Energy to research geothermal exploration technology as part of the National Geothermal Student Competition! We’re traveling to the Snake River Plain in SE Idaho this May and will submit a final research paper that we will (hopefully) present at the Geothermal Resources Council Meeting in Reno, NV in October. Check out the press and the contest page.

CSS Twitter Buttons

Jason Wright — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:18:11 +0000

Had to make this for a project I’m working on, and I figured the Internet should know. Twitter’s official buttons rely on JavaScript, which takes a second to run and is not usable in all circumstances. I whipped up a CSS equivalent that isn’t pixel-perfect, but gets the job done:

Live demo.

CUSD at the Intrepid Museum

Jason Wright — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:48:34 +0000

This past weekend, I visited the Intrepid Museum in NYC with Cornell University Sustainable Design to teach young children about potato batteries & molecular structures as part of National Engineers Week. Teaching about science & engineering is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had during my time at Cornell. Check it out on the CUSD website!

CU Business Asia (spring 2011)

Jason Wright — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:31:54 +0000

My work on Asian trade liberalization was published in the Spring 2011 issue of Business Asia. The magazine is an undergraduate publication run by a team of 20 dedicated students at Cornell, foreign correspondents in London and Beijing, and partners in Hong Kong and Canada.

Article

Download (PDF, 448.71KB)

Wien-bridge theremin (fall 2011)

Jason Wright — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:00:20 +0000

As a final project for Prof. Ehsan Afshari‘s Analog IC design course, Joe Ballerini, Matthew Newberg and I produced schematics, simulations, and layout for a Wien-bridge theremin. A theremin is a musical instrument where the pitch is altered by the capacitance created by the distance between an antenna and the user’s hand. Using Cadence Virtuoso, we created a design with low-distortion oscillation without using inductors that produces a wide range of pitches.

Report

Download (PDF, 1.09MB)

Presentation

Download (PDF, 1.12MB)

Debcite (summer 2010-present)

Jason Wright — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:27 +0000

Debcite is a search engine that provides the full text of articles based on search queries in the form of citations. It’s designed primarily for use by intercollegiate debate teams, which frequently share citations for evidence they have quoted in the past on a public wiki. Debcite saves massive amounts of time by automatically locating the source of these citations when freely available online.

I created Debcite in my spare time while working as a software development intern at Assured Systems, Inc. Debcite is written in PHP and JavaScript.

Demo

Check out the working implementation. Registration is required, but is automatically approved.

Source Code

debcite is open source software, and I invite modifications and contributions to the project. It’s available as a git repo.

Nerf Sentry Gun (spring 2009)

Jason Wright — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:00:29 +0000

The nerf sentry gun was a final project for Cornell’s CS1114 – Introduction to Computing with MATLAB & Robotics. Jeremy Blum and I used servo motors and a digital I/O device to rotate & fire a Nerf gun from the MATLAB environment. We also wrote motion-tracking software & a badge detection algorithm to detect intruders and fire upon them. » link

The project was the winner of the B.E. Ignignokt Prize for Innovation in Robotics and Computer Science, given to the best project that year.

Video

Source Code

Available as a git repo.