Parallel Programming,

To learn more about parallel programming and distributed systems, I built a 5 Node Raspberry Pi cluster.  It uses MPI, Python, JobLib, and MPI4Py and emulates a High Performance Computing environment.  After the build, I did a compare and contrast on the performance of Serial vs Parallel programming.

Artificial Intelligence

Designed with home security and surveillance in mind.

The hardware used is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with a Raspberry Pi Camera Board v2 enclosed in a clear case. When hooked to a monitor, a live video feed is displayed, and for each video frame, the program checks to see if a face or faces exist in the frame. If one or more faces exist, the program attempts to identify each face by comparing it to known faces in its database.

One significant discovery made during this project is the role played by light. With ideal lighting, the program identifies faces with about 90% accuracy, but with poor lighting, accuracy drops to an unusable level. Either better lighting, or a better camera is required.

Note: This was a group project during my Senior semester in college.  At the 2018 Indiana University Southeast academic conference, the project won an award in the Computer Science Dept.

The Bank Statement Converter

It was ugly … but it worked! 🙂

This was my first ever gui program. Originally implemented as a Java console app, a friend urged me to convert it to a C# Winforms app. It’s purpose is to automate the personal banking and budgeting process. Using a list of keywords (created by the user), it parses a CSV file, then classifies each transaction into an appropriate budget category.

After the initial setup, it takes about 5 minutes per month to reconcile the bank statement, and to balance the budget.

Version 2.0 is less ugly.

.Net MVC:

During our Capstone class, the instructor required us to create a website (to document daily/weekly progress).  Since I was elected the “web guy”, I wanted to automate the process of “making edits to the site”.  So instead of the project manager emailing me to make daily/weekly edits, I created an .NET MVC app which allowed him to log in and make changes himself.

As with many automation projects, it was a lot of work upfront, but when finished, it made everyone’s job so much easier.

The Password Vault

Not much to brag about, but it was a request from Mom 🙂   It’s a ‘password vault’ that allows user to enter names, passwords, notes, etc., and then before saving to a file, program encrypts all sensitive data.