Brennan Cain

Computer Engineering Student and Robotics Researcher

PWM Generation and Progress

The last couple of weeks, we’ve been working on learning about FPGAs and controls. This week, we made progress on the architecture of the FPGA as well as how to communicate between different IPs. We decided on a few structural componentsu00a0 such as to place the sensor processing to motor mixing in a single IP

Canyon Day

When I accepted the REU at UCSD, I really did not know what I was getting myself into. I knew that I might be making work trips around to different fields of study, but I never expected to end up hiking through canyons with some of my coworkers just for fun. This morning, we headed

New lab, new state, new project

This week I shipped out to San Diego, California to take part in the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program hosted by the Engineers for Exploration group at the University of California, San Diego. I am part of a group of 10 undergraduates working on engineering research projects for the next 9 weeks. I am

ColaHacks

A Hackathon is an “invention marathon.” ColaHacks was a hackathon sponsored by the University of South Carolina Women in Computing and Association for Computing Machinery student groups. At this hackathon, I worked on a team of three to design a sample software for computer science teachers to use in class. This software is able to

Genetic Algorithm for Traveling Salesperson Problem

I decided to revisit an old problem from my junior year artificial intelligence class. My final project was a genetic algorithm to find a non-optimal solution to a Traveling Salesperson scenario. This is not complete as it is not guarenteed to give an optimal solution in any run time, but it gives a reasonable route

Dragon Curve

I was working on a project for my math class and realized I had never implemented the dragon curve using linear algebra. I spent 15 minutes playing around with my calculator, realized I’m dumb, and spent 5 minutes minutes whipping this up using numpy. Code on github under my fun folder.

Programming Problems

I’ve begun to implement some of the classical programming problems in a Github repo. My goal for this is to become familiar with many of the problems in several languages. My plan for implementation is below: Sorts Data Structures Networking (server and clients) Machine Learning (Linear Regressor, Genetic algorithm, neural nets, k-means,) Path finders(Greedy, Djikstra,

Robotic Control Systems Class

I am teaching a class at my high school on the basics of robotics control systems and autonomous robotics. I derived the base curriculum from my research at MIT and adapted it to suit the programming skill level of my students. So far, this class has been a great success, my students are learning well

MakerMarket

I participated in a startup weekend at my town’s incubator. We worked for two days to develop a business plan and a prototype for our service. Our final plan was for a three-part business to educate people about additive manufacturing, create replacement parts for household objects, and print user-submitted parts. Throughout this process, I learned

ASGSR Conference and Presentations

I traveled with several students to Cleveland, Ohio to present our results and posters. This was an amazing experience and I am incredibly honored to have been able to attend. Out of around 10 teams that competed in the Capillary Flow Challenge, my team won first place on the basis of elapsed time to droplet