This page contains some scattered notes on some of the ideas I am working on or would like
to work on. If there is a link to any of the projects, it means that the project is beyond
the preliminary idea stage.

Electronics (macro or micro)

• How to make a resistor with focused ion beam.
• How to make a transistor with focused ion beam.
• Pictures of my first wearable computer prototype, Jun '99 (picture 1, picture 2, picture 3).
• Tutorial: How to Build Printed Circuit Boards -- by Kristof and Ozan. Doesn't cover
  how to use a schematic entry and pcb layout tools (such as PADS, Protel, Orcad, etc.).
  Assumes that the layout is ready and printed on a transparency. If you want to learn the steps before
  manufacturing such as schematic layout, there is a tutorial prepared by Protel - here is a local copy.
• Notes on Parallax wireless modules.
• Procedure to fabricate flexible PCBs.
• MIDI synthesis.
• Personal Area Networks.
• A context based power savings module [October 11, 2001].
• Push-button switch + piezo based power generation.
• Electroluminescent wire - check out what Maja & Dave did with EL wire (picture 1, picture 2)
• Do you like electronics? Did you know that the demand for tantile/columbite ore to manufacture tantulum
  capacitors is threatening the existance of gorillas in Kahuzi Biega national park? Read more about it in the
  open letter from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Computer Vision

• Skin color segmentation
• Notes and dataset for camera calibration.
• Optical flow.
• Readings in interest point detection.
• Matlab notes useful for processing regions in images.
  

Optics

• Matlab code for skew ray tracing through an optical system (implementation of the algorithm described in Smit, Modern Optical Engineering).

Pattern Recognition

• Expectation Maximization. Notes from p126 of Duda and Hart.
• Recognizing simple activities using multivariate statistics.
• Normalized cross correlation and sum of squared differences.
• Principal components algorithm and applications to image compression and face recognition.

Interface ideas

• Back to paper: A technique to support capture and access for Ubicomp environments.
  It differs from Hudson's paper PDA idea that requires a user scan their documents while
  this works in real-time. Related work for the accelerometer based pen section: Stylocom
• Augmented reality as a teaching aid
  

Literature surveys, bibliographies, paper summaries

• Wearable interfaces bibliography.
• List of challenges in ubiquitous systems from a Ubicomp '01 paper by Edwards and Grinter.

Operating systems and programming

• Tcl/Tk notes - coming up!
• Kernel Projects. During an attempt to understand the kernel and it's major data structures, I ended up
  getting a very nice book: Kernel Projects (for Linux) by Gary Nutt. It is organized as lab exercises to assist
  an OS course.I think it has about 12 projects. I will start with writing my own shell and put the code up here
  sometime.

In the works...

• Modular displays [March 15, 2002].
• Light source characterization for switching color models (spectroradiometer). [April 14, 2002]
• Accelorometer based pen.
• aya logo

Misc.

• Wish pile.