Crypto Master

2023-05-10 00:00:00 -0400

Awesome looking Bitcoin and Altcoin price management app, Crypto Master looks and works great!

Display top/all coins according to CoinMarketCap.com.
Display overview information or dig into historic coin price and market cap data.
Set your favourite coins.
Set up custom high or low alerts for your coins.

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Plane Tracker

2023-05-09 00:00:00 -0400

Flight tracker apps are slow, complicated, not very intuitive, bloated and add-riddled. Plane Tracker is simple, lightweight and good-looking.

It’s free, has no ads, looks great, lets you set trips with multiple flights. This app is open-source.

Note: This app had to be taken down from the Play Store. The API that it uses is unfortunately no longer free to use, you can read more about that here.

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Chef Buddy

2023-05-08 00:00:00 -0400

Are you one of those people that can’t seem to decide on what to cook? Use Chef Buddy to:

Create recipes, add description, ingredients, servings, preparation and images.
Log your daily eating, see what you’ve had for lunch or dinner!
Search for recipes online using multiple recipe sources.
Don’t know what to cook? Chef Buddy includes a configurable Spin Wheel that randomly selects meals!

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Remindy

2023-05-07 00:00:00 -0400

Track your tasks, long or short term. Add images, text, lists and more to your tasks, set deadlines too.

Remindy has three types of reminders:

One-time reminders. For tasks which have a set deadline.
Repeating reminders. For tasks which repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.
Location-based reminders. Remindy will notify you about these whenever you get to or leave a place, like Home or Work!

Attach rich multimedia to any Task. Some of the available attachments include: Lists, Text, Images, Recordings and Links!

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Ping Widget

2023-05-06 00:00:00 -0400

Ping Widget is a very small Android Homescreen Widget app that offers a nifty way to check server availability. Keep track of a host’s health and response time by pinging it and tracking this information in real-time.

Features:

Beautiful material design!
Calculates Max / Min / Avg and Uptime.
Live real-time line chart.
Multiple configurable options.
Ad-free.

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Contacts

2023-05-05 00:00:00 -0400

Contacts is a small test app consisting of a list of editable contacts. Available fields are: First name, Last name, Image, Date of birth, Phone numbers, Emails, Addresses.

Features:

Contact image can be resized, cropped, rotated, added from Gallery or Camera.
Contact type (e.g Home Phone, Work Email)
Integration with randomuser.me API for guickly generate random contacts!
Contact sharing.
Integration with the device’s dialer and email app.
Contact sorting.
Dark and light themes.

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CC Expense Manager

2023-05-04 00:00:00 -0400

Keep track of your credit card balance quickly and easily with your phone.

Online banking UX is just bad for the most part. GUI is often confusing and slow. Expenses can take a long time to get posted so most of the time I find it a bit useless. This app is designed to record credit card expenses using the phone camera, and it features:

A Simple Material design.
Add expenses manually or using your camera with text recognition!
Add expenses using your camera.
Track multiple Credit Cards.

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VU Meter

2023-05-03 00:00:00 -0400

A VU or Volume Unit meter is a device that displays a representation of a signal level, used in audio equipment.

This VU meter is made up of 7 rows of voltage-matched LEDs wired in parallel, these LEDs are driven by 7 switching MOSFET transistors. This “risky” parallel arrangement -which can potentially overdrive LEDs- bypasses the need to connect them in series, this:

Avoids the use of current-limiting resistors, which would waste current.
Not having to use higher (matched) voltages for each row, which would increase the complexity of the circuit.

A condenser microphone captures ambient audio. This microphone is wired to an op-amp in a 100x amplifier configuration. The amplified signal runs through 7 comparator op-amps which compare it with various voltage levels, if there is a loud enough ambient sound -like some background music is playing- the op-amps progressively switch the 7 transistors, lighting up the led rows.

The whole circuit can be powered from a single 5v 1A regulated power supply.

The sensitivity of the VU meter can be adjusted by varying the comparator voltages, lower voltages make the VU meter become more sensible to sound, and vice versa. Also, the brightness of the LEDs is adjustable, this is done by changing the voltage that the LED’s are being driven at, taking advantage of their diode properties.

The gallery below shows some of the pictures taken while building the circuit, which is separated into two boards: The vertical board contains the LEDs and the driver transistors, while the bottom board contains the microphone, the op-amps and other passive elements.

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Texting and Driving Simulator

2023-05-02 00:00:00 -0400

What is this?

This project was built using several technologies: UDK, Unrealscript, Unreal Kismet, a C++ DLL, Flash, Scaleform, 3ds Max, Photoshop, Android Studio and WiiYourself.

This driving simulator was built to illustrate the risks of driving while texting. The idea behind it is to quantify and evaluate if/how the attention levels and reaction times of a driver suffer when using a mobile device. To achieve this, the simulator does three short tests.

First, a Baseline reaction test where three random text messages are sent to the user's mobile phone. The user must reply to these messages, and the simulator records a baseline.

Second, a Driving test. Here, the user only needs to complete the circuit.

Third, a Texting and Driving test. In here, the user must both drive the vehicle correctly and reply to SMS messages in time.

What do we do with this data?

Once done with the tests, the simulator will display a set of results. These will graphically and quantitatively show changes in reaction time between the last two tests. See the results below:

Results page - Path comparison.

Results page - Text message data.

Results page - Speed comparison.

There are three difficulty levels, these modify things such as:

The amount of text messages the driver has to respond
The maximum time the user has to respond to messages.
The difficulty of the track and terrain.
Harder levels force a minimum vehicle speed.
The visibility of the track. Below is an example of how the difficulty affects visibility.

High visibiliy - Daytime.

Medium visibiliy - Afternoon.

Low visibiliy - Night.

The result is a simulator that reflects the consequences of driving a vehicle while interacting with a mobile device.

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Remotely Operated Snake Robot

2023-05-01 00:00:00 -0400

What is this thing?

This snake-like robot moves using friction …by dragging itself just like a snake! It can be remotely controlled via an Android application that allows the “driver” of the snake to move it forwards, backwards, left and right. A real-time 720p video feed from the nose of the snake is streamed to the client app at all times.

The robot’s head contains an array of high-brightness LEDs that can be toggled on in low-light environments.

Design

A computer generated 3D model of the robot was created before the mechanical model was constructed. This model was used to simulate the movements of the snake before its construction. Below is a 3D model of the final design.

A mechanical 3D model of the snake, head at the far right.

The snake has seven modules, each module has its own servo motor which allows a module to move with respect to adjacent modules. Each module has one degree of freedom which allows vertical -perpendicular to the floor- or horizontal -parallel to the floor- movement. A clever arrangement of modules allows the robot to move in straight sinusoidal fashion.

Sensors

Various sensors report the environmental conditions where the robot is:

An MQ3 gas sensor.
A DHT11 Humiture sensor.
An infrared obstacle sensor.
A microphone (Will stream sound to client app).
A digital temperature sensor.

The robot uses Wi-Fi to communicate to the Android app, several ports are used for communicatting commands and streaming real-time status (video and sensor) data.