If you’re an engineer, or have ever been an engineer and have since moved on to management or some other dreadful thing, then I’m sure you’ve seen documentation live and die in the trenches of confluence, notion, or a company wiki. A lone reference doc describing some then-novel esoteric service that was developed and then quickly abandoned; left to drive 8% of your business through a chunk of code only Tyler understands, if only he were still with us… Everybody understands that documentation is ...

Welcome to the special launch edition blog post! Now that Photosynthernet has been launched out to the public world via the url https://photosynther.net (as discussed in Part 1), I figured now was the best time to write the next installment in the “Building Photosynthernet” series. After reading, feel free to sign up on the live site and see the information presented here hard at work extracting color palettes from your images! Quick Part 2 RetroIn Part 2 we discussed things like what Perceptual ...

In the previous publication, I covered what lead to the idea of photosynthernet as well as explained some early research that led to building v1 of photosynthernet. So if you want some more background on what photosynthernet is and how we got here, be sure to read Part 1. If you’re just here for the cool parts, then read on! Quick Part 1 RetroIn Part 1, we learned 2 significant things that would lead to a more robust and successful palette algorithm for photosynthernet. Firstly we discovered we ...

What is it?Photosynthernet is an image hosting application that allows users to upload, organize, search, and share images with a central focus on their color palette. Photosynthernet takes any uploaded image, extracts the dominant colors, runs some corrective algorithms, and returns a palette of 6-10 colors. How did it start?The idea for photosynthernet originated while randomly thinking up domain names. You know, back when all the wacky TLDs started gaining traction and people were claiming do ...

TL;DR; Use esptool.py to upload your firmware over USB since it will automatically put your board in flash mode. Materials– ESP8266 Board – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010N1SPRK (HiLetgo ESP8266 NodeMCU CP2102 ESP-12E)– VSCode (optional, but recommended)– PlatformIO– esptool.py– MicroUSB Cable– Wifi Assumptions– Your OS is Ubuntu 18.04 The ESP8266 NodeMCU board can be a little finnicky. The main gotcha being that the board needs to be put into “Flash Mode” in order to upload firmware to i ...

Intro Oliver is a small track-driven robot controlled via a web application using MQTT to send instructions to an ESP8266 brain. Keep in mind that the ESP8266 runs on 3.3v logic, so the usual sensors you would use to do things like obstacle detection won’t work here. However, you’re more than welcome to use a 5v Arduino board and use something else for control instead of the ESP8266 Material Requirements Tank Chassis – https://www.osepp.com/robotic-kits/4-tank-mechanical-kit I used a whole tank ...

Someone from an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel needed a set of data normalized, all he knew was that it fell loosely into a bell curve (or was supposed to anyway). With that information, we can take the data set and calculate the equation needed to graph the bell curve. After we have the equation we then compare the difference between the value ‘y’ with the corresponding one generated by the equation. Our sample data set for now is: 1[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6, 13, 15, 18, 20, 19, 17, 15, 16, 13, 1 ...

The Cool PartIn a nutshell, I got to use machine learning to profile users and recommend them products based on browsing data and user profile analyses. The Problem (Business Requirements)For this project the problem I was presented with was a catalog of 30,000+ products in the same genre. How do we show users the products they want to see without having to click “Next Page” 1,000 times. Of course we could have bucketed users based on demographic, incoming traffic channel, geographic location, e ...