Nathan's Blog
These posts are largely technical writeups about past projects. I hope to add more interesting posts soon!
Posts
Spanning Tree, Matching, and TSP for Moving Points: Complexity and Regret
As part of my Master's Degree, I wrote a paper on optimal geometric structures
for points in motion. The paper was accepted to
CCCG 2023
and completed under the supervision of Prof. Subhash Suri. [...]
Controlling an Arduino from Python
There are a lot of tutorials online explaining how to control an Arduino from a computer using Python.
Unfortunately, many of them are outdated (for Python 2), don't work on Windows/Linux, or are hard to extend
to your use case. In this post, I'll show you how to control an Arduino from Python using
camino, which offers fast performance over a simple API. [...]
cqdm
Python's high level of abstraction makes it an excellent language for succinctly writing complex code. But that
convenience comes at a cost: compared to native code, pure Python can be orders of magnitude slower. Luckily, the
CPython interpreter supports C-Extensions. These are natively compiled modules that allow Python to call performant
C code. Almost every data science (numpy, scipy) or machine learning (tensorflow) package uses C-Extensions to get
sensible levels of performance. And these use cases make a lot of sense, because they're performing big, expensive
computations (like multiplying two large matrices). But can we also use C-Extensions to optimize small, cheap
functions? In this post, I'll detail my progression to a 4.5x speed up of the popular
tqdm library. [...]
Class Alerts
In high school (2016), a number of students started taking dual enrollment classes at a local city college. Dual
enrollment students had the lowest registration priority, so our classes were always full and waitlisted. To
help us get in, I made a script that would check the waitlists for availability and send an email when there
was an opening. This proved to be very effective, and I ended up building
a simple website around it.
By senior year (2019) almost every student that was taking dual enrollment classes was using the website. During the summer
before college, I rebuilt the project into
Class Alerts, ultimately supporting eight colleges. [...]
Air Guitar
The Air Guitar is a self-playing electric guitar. It has a rack of 24 pneumatic pistons that it can move along the
neck of the guitar. Using exclusively hammer-ons, it can play any MIDI file, automatically calculating a
tabulation that minimizes motor movement. It includes a synthesizer to play backing instruments. [...]