Early Projects

Visually enhancing my apartment

These were some of my earlier LED projects (circa 2007), which served as the inspiration for me to get more deeply involved with microcontrollers, so that I could precisely control how and when the LEDs would change colors.

I had my entire apartment completely decked out with thousands of LEDs in every room. Below are just a few photos.

My feelSpace belt — Adding a sixth sense

I had read a whitepaper called "Beyond sensory substitution—Learning the sixth sense" which detailed a device called a feelSpace belt that was composed of an elastic belt that one wears with twelve vibration motors embedded around its circumference, and a microcontroller with a digital compass that would cause whichever vibration motor was facing magnetic north to vibrate.

The whitepaper talked about how the body eventually stopped feeling the vibrations (much like wearing a pair of glasses all day long, eventually you can't even feel them on your face), but the brain started to innately integrate the vibration information into its own sense of direction, essentially reprogramming the neurons. Obviously once removed, the user did not retain this "sixth sense" of direction, but it sounded pretty cool, so I ordered a magnetic compass, designed a circuit (not pictured), and built myself a feelSpace belt.

It took hours to sew the wires in a spiral pattern so they could "stretch" along with the elastic.