Projects

ADBUSB

This is a board that converts Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) to USB, allowing you to use your favorite old Apple Extended Keyboard. After picking up a pair of old keyboards at the MIT flea market I knew that I had to do something about them. I did the sensible engineer thing and refuse to spend money to make my life easier, so I started hacking with my STK-500 and my (at the time) favorite HP 1631D logic analyzer, and within a bit I had a grasp of the protocol and what it would take to implement it. This is still a work in progress, and you can always find the latest on the Github ADBUSB project page.

SIAM32

This one was a total blast. I worked with my classmates Chris and Ben and we managed to code a USB 2.0 host controller entirely in software on an Atmel Mega32. I’ve never had to cram more engineer datasheet jargon than then, and it’s never been as challenging as that. We spent a month of long hours trying to get a mouse to work with our board, running into all sorts of problems (most of which were solved with ever-increasing amounts of caffeine). Chris and I took on the project again the next semester as an independent study and cleaned up the project. You can view our project pages for the Spring 2006 and Fall 2006.

Mobile Desk Chair Project

Back in high school my dad got me my first microcontroller: the BASIC Stamp. After getting through the basic projects I wanted something more challenging. A family friend donated an old electric wheelchair and I started hacking away. It wasn’t long until I had an accelerometer attached to a glove that I used to control the speed and direction of the chair. I ended up using that as my desk chair for the rest of high school. I’ve never asked, but I think my parents probably had to take out a special insurance policy for that… Sadly, the original blog is no longer available, but the Wayback Machine has a copy of my original write-in.