At the end of the summer, after what was probably hundreds of hours of thought and work, I handed my trusted robotic snake (Leonidas) off into the capable hands of a Robotics and Beyond founder, and said my goodbyes to InfoPlexus, my full time summer IT job. Then, on September 5th, about a week after every other one of my friends had left, I shipped straight up to the greatest city on the East coast (Boston, obviously), enrolled as a student at Northeastern University.
Let me start by saying that coming to Northeastern University was the single greatest decision I have ever made in my life. Initially, during the college selection process back in senior year of high school, I was pretty set on going to an all-tech school (ie, RIT, RPI, etc). I wanted to get as technical as I could. But then, one weekend, I went and visited my sister (who also goes to Northeastern), and had a sudden realization, that maybe I didn't want to put myself into such a hardcore engineering school. And what a good choice that was.
The best part about Northeastern (or at least what I've made of the engineering program there) is that you can make your experience there whatever you want. If you want to go and just be involved in your major-related classes, you can do that. But, there's always so much other stuff going on on campus that you can take advantage of. I know for me, the classes there weren't quite enough to keep me satisfied. This isn't to say that they weren't challenging (because some of them absolutely were) So, I began to look elsewhere for things to be involved with on campus. I became a member of the wireless club, a group devoted to amateur radio and circuit development/fabrication. I joined the FIRST Robotics team of college mentors for team 125: the NU-TRONS, and finally, became involved in research as a freshman working on developing programs in OpenCL to run in a multi-threaded environment (graphics cards mainly - hundreds of individual cores all working at once). Out of these three things, FIRST absolutely took up the most time. During build season, it meant being at the lab on weekdays from 6-9, and all day on weekends. Anyways, long story short, Northeastern has plenty of stuff going on (including classes) to keep an engineering mind busy.
Right now, I've been working on a new project, and it's come quite a ways in. This time, instead of ground based locomotion, I've been working in another field: flying. The last few weeks, I've been working a lot on a robotic tricopter. A helicopter, typically has one rotor with a set of blades on it. However, for a tricopter, as you can guess, it consists of three equally spaced rotors. By controlling the level of power flowing to each rotor, the yaw, pitch, and roll can be controlled by either artificial intelligence or directly from the user. Right now, the tricopter is already in the early flying stages (though not quite capable of steady flight yet), but its process is moving along fast.
Here's a picture of the current state of the tricopter, with more to come:
Here's a picture of the current state of the tricopter, with more to come:
