y-it's site

Plotter Art

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:54:27 -0400

The pictures made here were all made several years ago by now, but I am rewriting the descriptions now.

The first group of pictures are flow fields. Each point on the picture has a direction assigned to it. This produces shape to a similar manner as tributaries form. A bunch of starting points are picked on a grid, and continuously follow the direction at each point they end up at. The resulting picture can be changed by manipulating the directions. For example, squaring a coordinate makes it always positive, locking the paths only increase that coordinate.

Deriving the Line of Best Fit

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 21:31:52 -0400

We will define the set of points P as follows

P=\left\{(1,1),(2,2),(3,4),\ldots\right\}

And the line of best fit will be defined as

y=mx+b

Finally to express the error of a line just sum the error for each point. The error for a point is the squared difference between the point’s $y$ coordinate and the lines estimate for the point’s $x$ coordinate, $mx+b$ . The reason for squaring it is to make it always positive. Otherwise a positive error and negative error could cancel out. The reason for squaring instead of using an absolute value is for ease of the derivative. As an expression for each point it is $(y-mx-b)^2$ . The total error for the whole line can be written as:

Boat

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:17:47 -0400

A while ago I thought it would be a good idea to build a boat. I gathered a group of my friends to design and construct this thing. We had our first meeting where we agreed on random garbage we had that could be fashioned into a boat. The buoyancy would be provided from old barrels of car wash chemicals and the surface palettes and from leftover deck supplies. We bought 13 8’ 2x3’s for the main frame of the boat, and some metal strap to hold the barrels on.

High School Photography

Sun, 21 May 2023 21:17:01 -0400

These pictures were all taken for my advanced photography class in high school. All of the really fuzzy noisy ones where taken through a camera obscura made from a cardboard box.

Ruins

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 18:18:59 -0400

This is a picture of a building in Annapolis mid destruction. The sky was not originally this purple, nor were the shadows this intense.

Four Player Chess

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 19:01:14 -0400

I designed and printed a four player chess set, which can be packaged into a relatively small space. The outer 3 by 8 sections that each player’s pieces start in can detach, allowing it to be stored in the same size as the inner 8 by 8 section. Removing the outer sections also allows normal two player chess to be played on the board. The chess pieces I printed are hexagon chess pieces I found on thingiverse. All the models that I made I used openscad for.

3D Scanning with an xbox Kinect

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:48:28 -0400

I have always wanted to do some 3d scanning, but I couldn’t get photogrammetry set up on my computer. Recently I got a kinect, a camera that also does depth so it should be able to do 3d scanning. Processing seemed like a good choice for a language to use, since I am familiar with it and it has a kinect library. My code is directly descended from the point cloud example for openkinect-for-processing.

Colorado Springs

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 11:40:48 -0100

These are a bunch of pictures I got in Colorado Springs on a trip in 2021. The first bunch are from the Garden of the Gods.