Thomas's Blog

I am Bloated: After completing the Jenga Stacking Project. I am Bloated, heavily overconfident and with great pride. I became the first man to ever use a UFactory X6arm combined with D435, to stack a JENGA TOWER over 1 foot. And I decide to raise my level, and carry my potential towards this baddy: AI. Sure enough, I realized, fuck, for my last project I vibed my math, I haven’t learnt linear Algebra and I have not know how the heck neural networks and machine learning works. Okey, well that rea ...

DaTong Chen A few years back (2012), I was invited to write a yearlong entrepreneurship column for the Tsinghua alumni magazine Shuimu Tsinghua. Several installments recounted my experiences founding OmniVision Technologies in Silicon Valley and SpreadTrum Communications in Shanghai — a sort of summary of the first half of my life. But who could have guessed that in recent years, both companies would be acquired, delisted from the U.S. markets, and brought back to the motherland to embark on ent ...

Background I have a goal of stacking Jenga blocks. But before the robot arm can do anything fancy, I need to stop being scared of images. Short Goal So I started with this static photo of Jenga blocks from my desktop camera. The small mission: draw accurate rotated boxes, center dots, and labels around the blocks by the end of this post. The starting photo: five blocks, 640 x 480 pixels, shot with an Intel RealSense D435. The lighting is not perfect, the shadow is dramatic, and OpenCV ...

Click to see powerpoint Sin Frequencies Precal Open notebook in Google Colab 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172import numpy as npimport matplotlib.pyplot as pltfrom IPython.display import AudioSAMPLE_RATE = 44100def make_note(frequency, duration, volume=1.0): t = np.linspace(0, duration, int(SAMPLE_RATE * duration), endpoint=False) wave = volume * np.sin(2 * np.pi * frequency * t) fa ...

One year later… Last year was my first encounter with the robotic arm. I managed to understand what it is and how to set it up. Sounds superficial? Indeed! This spring semester I decided to face the robotic arm again, with a bit more patience and a bit more courage. I felt confident that at least I could learn a bit more on the software side. Goals: The GRAND goal was to stack Jenga blocks with closed-loop visual control rather than scripted coordinates. To achieve this, I gave myself some Sub-G ...

My Exploration of Tech: I started exploring tech at the beginning of the summer before freshman year. Before that, most of what I cared about was economics, politics, food, and tennis. So honestly, it was a pretty late start. My real, almost logarithmic boost into technology came in the fall of my sophomore year. Through Tech and Innovation I, I found a class that gave me much more freedom to access and experiment with different areas of technology. A lot of times, I would watch YouTube videos a ...

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Underwater ROV Remotely Operated Vehicle: Currently, we have achieved two major things: 1. Inherit the Files From the seniors Jake and Johnathan last year: BlueRobotics (BlueROV2) BlueFin Journal (Google Doc) 2. Obtain the CAD file of BlueROV2 by BlueRobotics BlueFin Presentation (Google Slides) CAD_ZIP Heavy_Extension_Version How Others Got Inspired: Replica Based on CAD Creative: Scanning: