2006-01-12
Taiwan breeds green-glowing pigs
2005-12-21
The Synapse Rooster Experiment
Well as I mentioned earlier here, armed with a wireless optical sensor that I borrowed from school and with a Peltarion Synapse beta, I decided to make a new alarm clock, this time based on light. This has taken some time - nearly two months of data collecting.
Two problems: I didn't know how to write new plugins for synapse and I did not know how the sensor worked. The latter was solved with a manual, but the former was more of a problem as the API documentation has yet to be released. Well, thank you microsoft for reflection! After some serious trial and error, I managed to write my component. One day, I might even write a short manual on the subject. That is if the boys and girls at Peltarion don't beat me to it.
Hardware setup:
(Optical sensor)
(Wireless receiver)
As for the software - simple - well, that is after I figured out how to write a component. My rooster (TM) component takes a sensor reading form the receiver, which happens to be the amplitude at ten different spectral frequencies. I pipe it to a simple neural network and train it using data on sunrise/sunset.
Finally, a problem that I did not think of, which sort of makes me an idiot was that I needed data and sunrise comes only once a day :( I collected it for nearly two montsh to get pathetic 58 data points. But it had to do. It did perform decently on the validation set.
So I deployed the final neural net and made an application with an über-advanced GUI ;):
And the test results from the first five mornings:
| According to table | According to the Digital Rooster |
| 8:56 | 8:57 |
| 8:56 | 8:56 |
| 8:55 | 8:55 |
| 8:54 | 8:54 |
So that qualifies as a success methinks! :) I'll have to think a bit what my next project will be. I do think it will be something with neural nets again though, because it's damn cool technology and the tools are finally getting usable.
2005-10-11
Ok, if you by any chance visited my old page back when Geocities had nice names like "CapeCanaveral" etc, then perhaps you recall my little MATLAB wake-up clock. Basically, I had a microphone outside my window and when the noise level got loud enough, my computer started beeping. Well, I've got an optical sensor and I've just gotten some cool neural network software that I'm itching to try out. So I'm going to make a digital rooster that uses the optical sensor to sense when daylight is coming. Stay tuned. I promise not to promise to write about it ;)
2005-08-30
Domestic robot to debut in Japan
2005-02-18
Walking Robot. Hehe:
Robots hit stride with human walk
2004-12-18
Old site is dead. :( No backup :( :( Not even a google cache :(