Hi all!

Boston’s in deep freeze, school is starting up, and xFair is around the corner. That means blog updates… yay!

My dedication to keeping this blog was even worse than expected. It’s a new year though so I promise I will try – and most likely fail – to keep this up to date.

To catch you all up, this year I was elected to keyholdership at MIT’s SIPB club, helped redevelop the school’s CourseRoad academic planner, and took some absurdly interesting classes. I also discovered the new love of my life, massive eater of my time, and favorite hobby… Formula SAE electric racecar!

Seriously, MIT’s team is amazing and it is an honor to work with them. It has been my most serious engineering experience to date. Unlike 90% of the project teams I’ve been on, they don’t flounder. FSAE has organized subteams, hard deadlines, and significant budgets.

I think the make or break factor is the team’s 12-20 hour minimium weekly commitment. Everyone at MIT is smart, but when students here put in the time to become experts the results are staggering.

Here are just a couple of examples that wowed me:

• The EEs build dozens of boards with three rounds of revision and testing.
• We run in-house dynamometer tests on all of our motors, rather than rely on manufacturer specs.
• The MechE team designed three prototypes for and spent $10000 load, wear, and stress testing their new planetary gearbox design.
• The software team collects gigabytes of sensor and controls data during the competitions endurance event. They have a telemetry setup that can provide a real-time data feed.

In any case expect a bunch more projects as I post some to the work that I have done for the team.

And as Steve McQueen once said, "”Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting.”.

I’ve resurrected the flight planner I wrote for my high school autonomous drone research project.

This project let us create paths of waypoints for quadcopter to follow faster and more accurately that looking up coordinates in Google Earth. It also let specify commands like HOVER or CIRCLE to perform at waypoints. This was my first real foray in to web development.

Please enjoy!

FlightTool

Creates, displays, and exports coordinate waypoint flight plans for drone autopilots. Powered by Cesium Engine.

Try out FlightTool.

Controls:

• Double Left-Click: Create a waypoint,
• Right-Click: Remove a waypoint,
• Left-Click: Select a waypoint,
• Select point → Click camera in infobox: Rotate view,
• Toolbar Fields: Change the selected waypoint,
• Export: Export the waypoints to a file (not currently formatted for Arudpilot Missions)

Install Cesium and Node.js from Cesium’s Site to run locally.

MIT License

Breakout is back from the dead!

Welcome back the mishmash horror haunting this dark corner of the net. My portfolio site lives AGAIN!

In all seriousness though, this website replaces my high school collection of the coding projects. I will try to resurrect some of those previous projects in my spare time (or lack thereof) and going forward I’ll add new posts and work here.

A quick update

Right now I am working on MIT’s Robotics Team. My subgroup is competing in the Microtransat Challenge. We are building a autonomous vehicle that will navigate across the Atlantic. I will probably post updates and illustrations of my work on that pretty frequently.

I am also part of SIPB, MIT’s computing club, so any projects I complete with them should also end up here. Other than that, anything’s game to end up on this site.

Till next time… BWAHHAHHHAHH!

This year, I have had the honor of working with my school’s student help desk. It is great group of tech-proficient students who work to resolve technology issues and empower others to do the same. We have a lot of fun and learn a great deal.

I have started writing articles for their blog, and I thought I should probably add those here as well. Anyway, here it is.

Hi, I am Charlie Vorbach and today I have the honor of providing you this week’s Student Helpdesk update. I have decide I want to talk about the school’s technology policy, STEAM focus, and, to mix it up, slime molds.

Now unless you have been hiding under a rock the past few years, you have probably heard how important emphasizing Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Design, Mathematics in schools is. Depending on who you talk to, STEAM might be the only way to ensure success, wealth, and social acceptance in our modern, super-competitive world.

At least, many people seem to think so. The President has given speeches advocating for STEAM, Bill Gates has given millions of dollars to support science and engineering education, and every lowly student is trying to fill their resumes with science and technology padding.

This vocal support for STEAM education has raised an opposition; detractors point out that not everyone can study STEAM, nor does everyone want to. I think partly true, but it overlooks technology/engineering skills’ broader applicability to problem-solving and how they influence every field from anthropology to zoology. Besides, changes in the global economy have allowed tech-savvy workers to prosper, something schools should aspire for their students.

Over the past few years, Bronxville has done an good job gradually introducing new classroom technology and emphasizing project-based, problem-solving courses. Chromebook carts and fancy ‘Innovation Labs’ have been slowly sprouting all over the school. After a few grumbles, students and teachers have gotten used to a new, infinitely-improved student portal.

Massive demand for AP Computer Science this year has spawned (keeping with the biology theme) multiple introductory and advanced programming courses. Advanced Physics and Introduction to Engineering has brought problem-solving and design challenges into the classroom as students build inductive iPhone chargers and water rockets. New independent studies (like help desk!) allow students to embrace project-based learning. Groups are building robots and programming autonomous drones. I hear someone even did something with plasma physics.

That brings me to slime molds. Incubator, hence the pun, is new club imported from Finland that promotes student research. Here are just a few of the ideas floating around the Facebook group.

• Hydrogen fuel cell

• Charge your phone with schools’’ left over fruits

• Plant graffiti

• Floating water skis for wave-skiing

• Corn starch armor

• Music composed of clicking noises with your tongue

• Bus tracker using Bluetooth receivers on each bus stop and emitters on every bus

• Audio spotlight

• Portable ping pong cannon backpack

I think it is amazing how creative Bronxville students can be and how impactful their ideas potentially are.

… Well, at least some of them. I can’t really see corn starch armor.