Barta

This was my Software Engineering Capstone project. I used to love an app called Yik Yak which was discontinued in 2017. I always felt that it brought the whole campus community together. So, for my capstone, I decided to make something similar to that. Barta is an app where people can anonymously post. The users can also read and comment on the posts of others within a certain geographic proximity they choose. There is a system of upvotes and downvotes for posts and comments which affect the user’s karma. It also has sticky icons (combining a random animal and a random color) which ties a user to a series of comments for a post without giving away their identity (something I borrowed heavily from Yik Yak). I had presented my work at Quest, a symposium held by SUNY Oswego where students present the work they are doing. You can find the code for both the back-end and front-end on my GitHub.

Transient Go

This was a team project for my Software Engineering course. Pokemon Go was a big thing that time. So, our professor decided that one of the teams need to work on an Android app which would let users catch Transiets (astronomical events) when they point the app in the right direction in the sky. I worked on the back-end to provide the app with the astronomical data and also store the user’s achievements while Brian Dorsey worked on the front-end which was based on the Sky Map app. I used Spark Java for my back-end work. We had a pretty cool app at the end which we demonstrated in front of the class. An user can catch transients and view information about them and also earn a score for catching them. High-achieving users are placed on a leaderboard which is viewable on the app. You can find the code for the back-end here.

Git Out of My Head

This is a project that I worked on with my friend Chris Wells at the RIT BrickHack 2016 hackathon. Thanks to MLH, this hackathon always has a lot of great hardware and swags. We picked up the Muse headset and decided to use it to control git. Muse headset is something that can pick up EEG signals based on brain activity of the wearer. We decided to use Jaw Clenches and Eye Blinks for our work since they worked the best with producing distinct EEG signal patterns. At the end, we had a simple git command menu to add, commit and push which could be controlled by Jaw Clenches and Eye Blinks. We won the hackathon’s Best Developer Tool Award.

Muse car

This is a project similar to Git Out of My Head. Because of its success at the hackathon, we used the same idea but applied it to a car. The user could start and stop the car using Jaw Clenches. The concentration level determined the speed of the car. We presented this at Quest where it was a huge success among the crowd. We later won an award from Sigma-Xi and ORSP for the presentation.