Projects

FPGA Vision Tracking Project

I originally became involved in this project while undertaking an internship at the University of South Australia in the summer of 2004. The project is a collaborative project with the Wearable Computer Laboratory and the Reconfigurable Computing Laboratory. The purpose of the project was to develop a new tracking system for the Tinmith wearable computer system, Tinmith previously used ARToolkit to locate fiducial markers attached to the users hands. ARToolkit is a big resource user so the goal was remove this from the CPU load freeing up clock cycles for other tasks. This was successfully done by implementing a hardware tracking solution on the RC200 Field Programmable Gate Array. Pictures more soon...

Bluetooth Pinch Gloves

There have been many iterations of the tinmith wearable backpack since its original design, I have played a large role in the hardware design of the backpacks and related hardware. Recently Wayne and myself have designed a new set of wireless pinch gloves to be used with the new improved lightweight backpack system. more...

Project Oxcart

Project oxcart was born when the firewire port on Wayne's Dell laptop was damaged due to a dodgy custom cable being use caused a voltage surge on one of the data lines. After dismantling the laptop, tracing down the damaged chip, finding a replacement, removing the chip from the motherboard and soldering on the replacement, we now always use a hub between the laptop and any cables we might be testing so as to prevent another project oxcart. more...

Foundry

Aaron Toney was very keen to make a foundry so after some lengthy discussions I gave in and decided to make one with him in my back yard. This was the first time I have been exposed to any metal casting so this is a write up of what I learnt and some really cool pics of glowing embers and liquid metal. more...

Hot Wire Foam Cutter

After some experimentation with the foundry Aaron and I discussed making a hot wire foam cutter to make foam parts that we can then use to make Aluminium casts using a technique called lost foam. Aaron chose to make a freeform cutter and I made a foam plane, together these made an excellent combination and we were able to make quite detailed parts. more...

CNC Mill

Before I discovered PCB etching I was determined to build a PCB mill that could cut out PCB,s on a copper cladded piece of fibreglass. I built a number of different versions before the lab I work in bought a Taig CNC mill. I have also used the mill for cutting out plastic and metal parts for prototypes.more...