Sunset II
Awwww, I just really like taking pictures of sunset. #nofilter
Python speech to text with PocketSphinx
I’ve wanted to use speech detection in my personal projects for the longest time, but the Google API has gradually gotten more and more restrictive as time passes. In order to ensure that my projects could work even without an internet connection, I looked for another speech recognition package that would preferably be easier to use. I found the Sphinx voice recognition suite of CMU to be a really great speech to text package. However, documentation and sample code is non-existent, so it took me forever to get anything done. Finally, I’ve figured it out! The example code is at the bottom of this post, but you can directly download it from Github here.
Here are the steps to take to get this working:
- Download SphinxBase and follow the install instructions
- Download PocketSphinx and follow the install instructions
- Download PocketSphinx-python and follow the install instructions
- Run the code below
Equations of motion for a planar simple double pendulum
To provide some background information for my N-link pendulum project, I’ve broken the methodology for solving the equations of motion (EOM) for a simple double pendulum into a separate post. I’ll explain to the best of my abilities!
The pendulum that we are solving for is composed of two masses, m1 and m2, suspended from each other by strings of length l1 and l2. Their positions relative to 0 is represented by theta1 and theta2. The entire pendulum is supported by point 0, which is a frictionless, massless point. The whole thing is a pain to create digitally, so I drew the setup below:
This will be a pretty long post, so scroll to the bottom for the cool graphs!
N-link compound pendulum simulation
For our Mechanical Dynamics final project, a friend and I decided to generalize the equations for compound pendulums to write a simulation program that could generate animations for n-link compound pendulums with user specified lengths, masses, angular displacement and velocities. We originally wanted to write a full blown physics engine, but quickly realized that two weeks was not enough time to do something of that scale, haha.
First things first, a demonstration! The following is an simulation of a 5 link compound pendulum:
Read our final report for a more formal/comprehensive explanation of the process!
Download the code!
PseudOS — A baremetal RaspPi OS
Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I thought I’d do a debrief of a couple of cool projects that I’ve worked on this past year. First up, PseudOS, a baremetal Raspberry PI OS that I wrote with some friends for our Software Systems final project.
(We were really sleep deprived when making the final video, apologies for any strange noises we make.)
It doesn’t look really amazing, because we didn’t really implement any OS features other than UART and a basic calculator program. However, we did do this all baremetal. What is baremetal, you ask? Well, it means that the code we wrote interacted with the RaspPi at the hardware level. We modified an Assembly boot file to give us control over the hardware registers, and wrote a kernel in C to provide the actual OS functionality. This website was an amazing resource for us through the whole process.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chocolate Chip Cookies
2016-01-03 22:38:34
So delicious
Prep Time
20 min
Cook Time
15 min
Dry
- 1 1/3 c AP flour
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp cocoa powder (optional)
Wet
- 1/2 c softened butter
- 1/2 c brown sugar
- 1/2 c white sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Extras
- 1 c semisweet chocolate chips
- walnuts? almonds? gummy bears?? whatever extra stuff you like!
Instructions
- 1. Preheat oven to 350F
- 2. Mix dry ingredients together well
- 3. Cream butter with sugar until you can't see clumps of butter anymore
- 4. Mix in egg and vanilla
- 5. Mix dry in wet
- 6. Pour in chocolate chips
- 7. Shape into vaguely ball shaped objects, and place on baking sheet well spaced.
- 8. Bake for 15 minutes, but check the oven around 10 minutes or so. Cookies should still be soft when coming out of the oven, as long as the bottom of the cookies are brown
- 8. Eat delicious cookies.
Notes
- Depending on the condition of the butter, the resulting dough may be either too crumbly or too watery. If too crumbly, use 1/2 tsp of milk to get the dough to form. If too watery, refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes or so until firm.
- Watery dough will cause the cookies to spread a lot and be really thin. Crumbly dough will make your cookies taste like rocks. Your preference though, haha.
sophie's blog http://blog.justsophie.com/
A decade later, I have refined the cookie baking process, and have come up with a recipe that seems to be received pretty well. The card is at the top of the post, but more detailed instructions and pictures will be below.
A Reflection on 2015
Since it’s the last day of the year, it’s prime time to do some reflecting!
All in all, this year was pretty great. I got a summer internship at Apple, which has opened up an insane amount of doors. Though I’ve still got far to go and much to learn, being selected for a summer internship at such a big company has given me quite an ego boost. Still, since confidence easily turns into pride, I hope that I can rein it in a bit in the coming months. Quiet confidence is what I’m aiming for, the kind that manifests itself as an aura instead of hot air.
I’d really like to make blogging a habit, but the lack of free time in my schedule makes it difficult. And it’s not just time, but motivation as well. I enter each semester brimming with ambitions and ideas, but always end up burning out near the end. I’d like to put more effort into work life balance next semester, impossible as it may sound. I’ll pour more free time into working on Edwin instead of fooling around on the internet.
Look at how cute he is!
There’s a paper deadline coming up in March, and I really need to buckle down and really think about how I’m going to write this and present it. My robotics professor has poured a lot of time into my project, so I need to repay him in kind. Slacking off would not only be a detriment to me, but an insult to him.
I promise that we’ll do great things together Edwin!
On a separate note entirely, I haven’t been able to bake or cook as much as I’d like to this past semester, but I’m hoping to change that by having some new posts dedicated to cool recipes that I have. I have a lot of interests, but I think with proper time management I can succeed at all of them. It’s a matter of arbitration and passion I suppose. I made some really great green tea almond cookies last year, and I’m hoping I can dig up the recipe for it again.
I’ve also bought a new camera, and I’ve been playing around with the features. Photography is a really interesting art, one that I’m hoping to learn a bit about. One way I practiced was following my friends around and taking pictures of their lives. It was pretty fun and an interesting way to spend more time with people. I think I’ll try to do more of that next year too.
She’s super talented. (Taken and published with permission.)
Whether its music, photography, or technical expertise, I’m going to continue working on learning all the things and doing all the stuff. Next year is going to be great. š
-Sophie
POE: The Gif Collection
We made a little desktop companion for our PoE (Principles of Engineering) final project. The goal of PoE is to create a final project that integrates electrical, mechanical, and software engineering to make something really cool out of it. Our project is inspired by Strandbeests, and does a really cool wave motion.
Installing OpenCV for C++ and Python
Copying the instructions from my awesome robotics professor Paul Ruvolo from here so I don’t lose these steps:
To install OpenCV, go ahead and type each of these steps into your terminal window. Note that the “make” step will take forever, so go grab some popcorn or tea once you get there.
$ wget https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/archive/2.4.11.zip
$ unzip 2.4.11.zip
$ cd opencv-2.4.11
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE \
-DBUILD_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON \
-DWITH_XINE=ON \
-DWITH_OPENGL=ON \
-DWITH_TBB=ON \
-DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON \
-DBUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON \
-DWITH_V4L=ON \
-DOPENCV_EXTRA_MODULES_PATH=./modules
$ make -j2
$ sudo make install
In a nutshell, we download OpenCV 2.4 to the temporary folder, build it, make with two CPU cores, then install.Ā It seems like those cmake parameters are actually pretty important to get stuff working!
-Sophie
She’s a circle.
She tells me that she feels like a circular puzzle piece.
And though I know sheād never tell me why, I have a pretty good idea of the reason anyways. She yearns for his love, and brandishes an eraser as proof of her dedication.
āI like girls that are niceā He says, so she demolishes the castle of her convictions and redraws her beliefs in sand.
āYou have nice smileā He says, so she pulls the edges of her tears into those upward crescents, smiling, always smiling.
I tell her sheās over-reacting. āPeople say that stuff all the time.ā
She smiles back, āI know.āĀ
But she doesnāt. Her soul has no edges, she’s blurred away anything that could possibly maim his perception of her virtue. People say that lovers are puzzle pieces that fit together prettily. How does a circle fit with anything?
-Sophie