Harishankar
An ordinary human with huge passion towards electronics design from childhood. Later seduced by computer programming & became software architect by profession.
Posts
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Growing a Seashell in Code
A beach holiday got me curious about how seashells get their shapes, so I rebuilt one from scratch in Rust: coiling, ornament, pigment and light, with live 3D viewers you can play with.
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The 2,000-Year Code Review: Building an IDE and AI Arena for the Kural
A closest ancient skill to computer programming that I can think of, is writing poems (pun intended). I always felt close to Thiruvalluvar, as he was one of the ancient…
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The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it.
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Learning Rust lang by implementing a Ray Tracing renderer using AI
Whenever I want to learn a new programming language, explore an acceleration framework, or dive into a new chipset or math co-processor, my go-to experiment is implementing a ray…
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PowerTiger - Monitoring energy consumption with better granularity
A few years before the Covid pandemic, I set out to apply my tech skills to everyday life with the goal of enhancing my lifestyle. Having worked extensively in product…
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Decoding 2D Lidar Data: Interfacing Sensor from Robotic Vacuum Cleaner 3irobotix CRL-200S
After removing the Lidar sensor from my robotic vacuum cleaner, my curiosity was around how this remarkable device operates. My goal was to understand the interface protocol and…
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AI assisted coding (GitHub Copilot) and never going back
It began when the CTO at my workplace, where I'm currently employed full-time, proposed, "Let's give GitHub Copilot a try; it could cut down engineers' time by 40%." He reiterated…
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Custom PCB for the gaming console based on RP2040
In this blog post, we delve further into the fascinating journey of crafting a retro-style game console entirely from the ground up—an extension of my previous article.
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The Leopard of silence - Street Art in Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania was very different than how I imagined. People were very cool, unjudgmental and very calm. Usually cities are very different as people tend to be fast and look…
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The dream of reaching near space
Around the 1990s, my parents moved to a rented house in the center of our home town Rajapalayam. Thats when I first met our landlord Mr.Rajalingam Raja who was a retired…
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Building a retro style game console from scratch
Game console built from scratch using RPi Pico micro controller and 2 inch LCD display
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Remote ePaper display using ESP32
I had a 7.8 inch ePaper display from Waveshare lying around for a while. This is an expensive eInk display with 1872x1404 pixel resolution that supports 4 bit grayscale values.
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Home power consumption monitoring using ESP32
Its always fun to collect data around you and understand your needs better. When it comes to power consumption, end of the month bill gives us a pretty good view, but I wanted to…
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RaLiSat-1 Base station system design
For my high altitude balloon project, I am designing a portable base station system to recieve the transmission from the payload.
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RaLiSat-1 design challenges - Payload internal temperature
As we know, the higher you reach in altitude, the lower the temperature and pressure is. At around 25 kms which is my target for this project, the temperature is -56°C. This is…
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RaLiSat-1 Payload system design
To start with, I had basic goals for designing the payload system. Including basic sensors necessary for the tracking, camera to capture the beauty and the design to sustain the…
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Aquarium automation using Raspberry Pi
As a childhood desire, I always wanted to try setup an aquarium at my home. The desire was always there deep inside and never sparked until my daughter had to do some school…
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Interfacing Ublox GPS M8N with Raspberry Pi
Ublox GPS M8N module support UART communication and its fairly integrate with your Raspberry Pi. Just connecting to power and Rx wires will allow you to read the GPS NMEA…
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Sending large data like images over Lora
Got obsessed with the Lora module E32-868T30D after playing with it for couple of months now. To be honest, this seemed to me like a life saver for hobbyists to start on RF. My…
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Connecting Lora E32 module with Raspberry Pi
Article explaining how to connect Lora E32 module to Raspberry Pi device and python code to send data between 2 modules using Lora communication.
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Why blog (again)?
Tried a few times before and gave up on blogging each time! Even micro blogging didn't work well for me. After all the failure attempts, this time trying something different to…
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Ray Tracing and more into Computer Graphics
Its been a long time since I wrote anything here. Been busy with many projects at work and hobby. Recently been working on a Ray Tracing Rendering Engine for our iOS / Android App…
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Validating Yourself as a Good Game Developer
Do you hate anything other than traditional CPP? Even after using a lot of new and powerful languages (C#, Java, Python, and whatever), when it comes to game development, do you…
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Google AI Challenge Ants 2011 - Post Mortem
As a 3 week hard work and sleepless nights, I took the 127th rank in Google AI Challenge Ants 2011 and 1st in my country India. I thought the experience was worth sharing in this…
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Hacking iPhone 4 into a Digital Microscope
I was always eager to zoom in to things to see if I can find microbes. This time I took a step forward and opened up one of my old DVD drives to remove the lens inside. I…
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Kinect + Box2D
Past few days I've been trying to arrange a marriage between my Kinect Algorithms and Box2d and it finally came up very well. As they both didn't really love each other I had to…
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Complex Gesture Recognition using Kinect
Like I said earlier, I was working on some complex gesture recognition system that can recognize numbers. The whole system was built with Embedded systems in mind, so its just c++…
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Clean Background removal with blob detection
Yes, am a little ahead in the background removal. I have now removed the background noise that escaped from my first layer background removal algorithm. I've added a second layer…
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Blob Detection in Kinect
After background removal, I've now completed the blob detection algorithm. After reading a bunch of blob detection papers, I ended up with my own (modified version of…
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Background Removal for Kinect Depth data
I am wondering if am atleast 10% towards completion of the skeletonization code. However, here is the best background detection and removal, I could do. This code is not based on…
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Skeleton detection code for Kinect
As I promised earlier, I am now working on a Skeleton detection code that can work independently on any device. It will mostly be on c and c++ so it can be ported on to any…
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Controlling TV and Set-top box with Kinect
I finally made it work. Detected skeleton using OpenNI and detected some gestures using my own code. Now I also connected a USB-UIRT (www.usbuirt.com) device to my Mac Mini in…
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Skeleton tracking on MacOS using Kinect
Finally I successfully integrated OpenNI and NITE beta on my macOS and tracked skeleton. Before I tried OpenNI, I was trying to build my own algorithm to detect just the fingers.…
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Kinect libraries integrated with Cocoa in XCode
Now, I just integrated OpenKinect into my xCode project and can read the meshes into my opengl scene. As a next step am going use my own algorithm to find fingers. :) Great…
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My first step in Kinect and Mac Mini
I just successfully compiled the openKinect and tested my new device Kinect. As I don't have XBox with me, I had to wait until I can make this code work on Mac OSX. Here is the…
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GPS chip for the near-space mission
The GPS chip, I ordered has just arrived and am starting the work by tomorrow. I chose a SIRF III based custom built GPS chip from Inventek. The reason behind my choice are as…
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Indian High Altitude Balloon Club
Here, we go. Having a dream dumped deep into your head for past 16 years and finally started to work towards making it come true is not a joke. My Godfather (50 years elder to me,…