Some Projects and Things
Below is a mix of hackathon projects (that I’ve worked on in a team with friends), and personal projects. Make sure to click the title of projects that seem interesting to you, because then you can see more information and content related to them.
Of course it goes without saying that everything is open source, and in most cases the titular link will take you either directly to the source, or to a Devpost page from which you can find a Github link.
Network over Rube Goldberg Machine
AstonHack7
12 Dec 2021
This one was really fun. We wanted to transmit raw data, but where each bit of an 8-bit byte is transferred in its own weird and quirky way.
One bit was transferred by a camera looking at a rotating flag, and seeing if it’s red or green; one by scanning a QR code which can be spun round to show an alternate one; one consisted of a servo motor physically pushing a button; to name a few…
I believe we got data transmitting at almost 3B/s!
Tomb of Avarris
HackTheMidlands 7.0
30 Oct 2022
This was a cool idea by one of my teammates - basically, a Jackbox-esque party game where each player (each with their own chosen class abilities) has to come up with a solution to a given problem.
Then, they have to make the argument that their solution is the best/funniest/most creative of all the players, to win a round!
Rotochess
OxfordHack 2022
13 Nov 2022
Chess around a Rubik’s cube. On your turn, you can either move a chess piece of rotate a slice of the cube.
I was really surprised at how difficult it was to program rotation of a Rubik’s cube in a way that facilitated chess pieces to move over it, in the space of 24 hours…
Knuckles
HackSussex 2023
19 Feb 2023
Maybe my favourite hackathon project yet: a robotic hand using nitinol wire (shape memory alloy) for actuation, complete with webcam image processing to mimic your own fingers, and a little LED display just to look cool.
Purchess
HackNotts 84
05 Nov 2023
Online realtime chess, but with extra pieces! Knooks, knaves, priests, rocks… Giraffes? And many more!
This was a nice simple idea, executed reasonably well. There’s a lot of room here to expand upon, for example I’ve been thinking about different ways of completely generalising chess piece movement, and devising some format to represent these movement patterns.
Jailbreak
Royal Hackaway v7
28 Jan 2024
A fun little game where you, a prisoner, have to convince a lunch lady to give you nicer food, and a warden to let you out of your cell.
Since it’s 2024, we used the ChatGPT API to “script” these characters on the fly. It’s pretty easy to convince the lunch lady to give you the lovely “crunchy brown bombles” (and in fact, you can even get her to help you write Python code, if you ask nicely enough), but it’s extremely difficult to convince the warden to let you out of prison.