Software – Christian Ryan Alvaro

Design for the Time: Lessons from Building an RGB Clock

I’m making a digital clock. It’s an analog-style interface but with 132 RGB LEDs at each tick. Software-side, I needed to rewrite the existing DS1307 RTC libraries that communicate with the Arduino’s microcontroller, since they didn’t do data verification for valid times, and they relied on communicating with the module every second, putting a massive strain on the microcontroller. I solved these problems by offloading the timekeeping effort to the microcontroller, giving it a data structure I designed for it to update. The RTC could then be a backup of the time the microcontroller could read from whenever it powers up. Hardware-wise, I designed my own PCB to create a neat and compact space for all the components.

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Making a Reddit Bot That Conjures Spirits

I use Reddit a lot, mainly for discussions, news, cute pictures, cool GIFs, and memes. In the midst of all the subreddits, one in particular, r/AskOuija, is this interesting crossroads of the Internet’s ability to collaborate along with its collective humor. But there’s a problem – on Reddit I can easily save and share images and links I find on the platform, but since r/AskOuija is mainly text, is there a way for me to convert text on Reddit into images (and give me an excuse to learn how to use various web APIs)? This is how I learned to make a Reddit bot.

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Factor Graphs and the Matter of Security

In 2017, Equifax had a security breach. The breach caused millions of users’ personal information to be compromised. In 2018, in my data science class, we applied some knowledge on data science, factor graphs, and a bit of networking to detect these kind of attacks.

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My Mixer with MiMoSA

In my data science with engineering applications class, I learned how practical data science can be helpful in other fields. In this project, I used clustering and principal component analysis to see if Metformin, a drug used for diabetes, is effective in treating cancer.

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Visualizing Air Pollution with Python

During my fall semester senior year, I worked with two things for the first time, Python and data analysis, in an atmospheric sciences-focused computing and data analysis class. At the end of the semester, each of us chose our own dataset and project to work on. I took a dataset that tracked air pollutants within each district of Seoul, South Korea each hour over a week and visualized it. Again, this was all with no prior experience in data analysis and Python, and with no domain knowledge of atmospheric sciences to boot.

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