This thread is for showing your personal projects to the community, I’m sure everyone has something that they are interested in and working on when they find the time. It could be anything from game development to making paper models of Homeworld ships, to repairing a Mustang gearbox.
So if you do have anything that you are working on and want to share with the community, please post it here.
I’ll get the ball rolling, being part of this community for a long time, I have somewhat fallen in love with the whole procedural generation idea. Being a Software Engineer, the way this is expressed is by coding and this lead to my Planet Generator prototypes.
Currently working on a Technical Project with some other apprentices all over the region. Initiated by Skills-Projects.
We just finished the Engineering Phase and commenced ordering parts and manufacturing them. Next monday I’ll head over with some of the team to a sponsor and manufacture the coils for the project.
Inspiration for the project comes from this. The idea wasn’t ours, it was put forward to Skills-Project and they offered it as something we could do:
Our goal is to create a device that can display Images, Animations and Games with an array of extendible pins.
Our team consists of 5 people. Until now I did the Engineering for the Drive Mechanisms (Coils, Permanent Magnets), Drive Electronics (Based on LED Driver STP04CM05B1R, Controlled by Arduino Mega 2560) and LED Lighting (Based on NeoPixels).
We won’t do any of the motion tracking as we lack the competence. Also coils turned out to be great choice but won’t ever reach the height of the Powered Faders the MIT used.
Due to this we decided against analogue control. But we will use NeoPixels to bring in some colour!
Not a lot to show as we only did Engineering, Planing and Prototyping. Will bring some updates later on when the thing actually stands. Felt like posting now as I really like doing projects and want to show that
I decided I wanted to test whether a neural network produced more accurate results than the methods we had used, so I started developing one. It’s mostly done, but I haven’t had a chance to work on that in a little while.
I took on a consulting project back in the fall where I evaluated the accuracy of some commercially available face recognition services (word to the wise: they can be disturbingly accurate if they’re well trained).
I’ve also been writing a simple 2D N-Body planetary system simulator (but, again, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on it lately).
I took a weekend a few weeks back to teach myself intro statistics, so that I could tutor intro statistics. I mean, that’s less a project than it is my job at the moment, but it’s keeping me busy.
Oh, and I’m currently analyzing horse racing results to test how accurate bookies odds actually are.
Oh, and if I can finally land a regular, full-time job somewhere, I plan on dusting off JENI and getting back to my writing projects.
I can see some money coming in for you from betting on horse racing, I did some stock market analysis, the odds are not good, maybe you have more luck than me.
Nah, I’m not much of a gambler. It’s more out of curiosity than anything else, though I do know someone who is interested in hearing about my results, and may be willing to toss a few bucks my way if there is anything of interest in them.
I just have to finish building my web scraper so I can collect more data.
My goodness, a personal project thread. Pretty much my entire adult life has been filled with various projects. Outside of my day job (Mechanical/Aerospace Engineer), and of course working with INS on Infinity Battlescape, I have had one huge long term project that has spawned dozens of smaller projects. In 2004 before I heard of Infinity, and while deeply entrenched in playing EVE Online, I purchased a 63 acre parcel of land that was fully wooded, all trees. I cleared about 10 acres of trees to build my eventual homestead complete with some ponds, and one day a house and a few barns. I am DIY (do it yourself) kind of person, and that means to do all this work I acquired all the necessary equipment to make the project happen. This can be quite dangerous financially, due to the fact of equipment breakdowns/repairs, however, I mitigate this by doing all the repair work myself. Also, if I need special equipment or tools, I use my CAD skills to design and build them.
It would take too much text to describe this long term project, so I made a project collage. The first row of satellite pictures shows the overall progression of the terraforming, the preceding pictures read like a book chronologically (for the most part). That last couple rows of pictures shows some of the repair work that had to be done to date. This project will continue for some time…
My latest non-software project has been working over my kitchen. Replacing appliances, designing and building a new island, etc. Though not finished, here’s what it looks like. The side opening is for a pullout trash container.
Work was suspended over the winter when the garage was getting just too cold for it to be any fun. That, even after I insulated the garage door.
I’m not very hardcore about working on the house, so I’ve just been dabbling. If I was married, my wife would have killed me by now. The kitchen level has been a mess for the last 9 months.
I also made a pair of 10-move puzzle boxes for my nephews and nieces. Each Christmas I give them some kind of an experience (a camp, music lessons, ski trip, whatever). Because they get a note, I like to make it interesting for them to figure out what their gift is. So each year it’s a puzzle. Normally word or number puzzles, but this time I went with a physical puzzle.
If I ever do another such box, I’ll be sure to get the grain properly oriented. I did it the way I did in order to minimize cutoffs. Plywood ain’t cheap. The boxes were my own design, using Sketchup.
Which reminds me that I’ve written programs for taking the Sketchup designs and laying the parts out on sheet plywood. I used another one to lay out the sticks for the island top on the lumber that I had. And another one to figure out how to glue them up for a nice pattern in the top.
I love it when I can write software that I’m going to use.
These days, I’m rewriting the warp prototype’s autopilot stuff. These are the times when I wish my math skills were stronger.
And I’ve really gotta give that thing a better name than “warp prototype”.
Nah. I picked them up about 15 years ago, piece by piece, partly as a collection and partly as a set of tools that I could work with. Which explains why I have multiples of several types. They’re all Stanleys, and they’re all scary sharp.
They date from the 1900s to the 1940s or so. My grandfather was an auto mechanic, so the heirlooms from him were of a completely different sort.
By the way, your homestead project is quite impressive. What was the inspiration for it? Do you just like the idea of making your mark on your own land? Or is this the only way to get a custom homestead at a reasonable price?
I guess many things inspired me. First & foremost being raised by the parents I have, has an awful lot to do with my work ethic. My father was also DIY kind of guy, mainly due to financial constraints, his wife somehow convinced him to have 9 kids…
There also was a money saving element to it. Even though I bought a bulldozer, excavator, all manner of tractors and the like, I was confident enough in my abilities mechanically to not let those purchases lead to financial ruin/project implosion. If I were to have contractors quote all the work I did, I would have never been able to afford that. Though I have likely been a bit financially inefficient along the way here & there.
Lastly, I am a loner through & through. If I want something badly enough, I research the heck out of it until I am confident I can create it myself, then I go for it. As far as “leaving my mark”, nah, I never really think in those terms. It could be turned into a super Wal-Mart after I am dead for all I care
