REAGAN || ENGINEER

  This post covers the basics of cellular automata via Conway's game of life and a 3-dimensional derivative of it that I programmed. The images below are a couple frames extracted from that program. While at community college, I attended a night class in C-programming where I had the opportunity to develop Conway's game of life as a text program. It initiated a deep fascination for cellular automata and the idea that a computer could generate an entire world given a basic set of rules. Interestingly enough, Conway was not actually the founder of cellular automata. it was theorized 30 years earlier by John von Neumann & Stanislaw Ulam. von Neumann was interested in different methods of colonizing mars, and one of them involved self-replicating robots to setup living environments for humans. As a result of breaking that concept down to its foundations, Neumann was able to extract the theory of cellular automata. Conway popularized cellular automata with his game of life. He o...

I had a class last year with a a simple programming project. We were asked to program TI's MSP432 running energia (the arduino IDE for their ARM Cortex processors) to play various note when a push button was pressed. They let us use the tone libraries to output a square wave at a set frequency. The programming was very simple, too simple. We spiced up the project by first replacing the push buttons with potatoes. Using a voltage divider and the human body we used capacitive touch to sense when the potateos were being touched. We wanted to play axel F which requires a sawtooth wave. We built a simple DAC using a resistor ladder, the tricky part was getting the MSP432 to flip the pins on and off quickly. We couldn't finish the project using the Energia Pinwrite command, it was much too slow to work with a resistor ladder. Instead we had to program the registers directly. Notice my 200 year old oscilloscope in the back, only one channel works. This is what a college budget looks l...

  This is doubtfully the prettiest 3d printer you've seen and thats because I found it on the side of the road. It looked like it had been spartan kicked down 6 flights of stairs. The rods for the x and z axis had been bent and the print deck was cracked. to finish it all off, many of the wires were cut or ripped and the heated was cracked. A couple of dollars in materials and a trip to the framing section of Micheal's (for a print bed) and the printer was ready to go. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how much of pile of garbage the proprietary print software was and I wasn't the only one. someone had already worked out the details for an eprom flash that supported repetier. It was as easy as flashing an Arduino because I was flashing an arduino. Big thank you to the designers of the firmware - https://github.com/luc-github/Repetier-Firmware-4-Davinci I used fusion 360 to work out the designs, the videos below are a short build compelition. I designed some 1/4 inch socke...

 This is a very simple 8-bit architecture with 7 registers and an accumulator for storing intermediate results. I call it, the Primis - which should be Latin for first - it being my first computer design. The pipeline is limited to two stages: The first to the accumulator and the second to the load function on the register array. There are no flags on the ALU for negative values or zeros, these could be added later; however, I'm happy with this design and I plan to move forward from here. (8-bit CPU "Primis" - designed by James Reagan 2019) Below is the architecture of the almost 45 year old Intel 8008. It is clearly more advanced than my simple 8-bit architecture. It has dynamic frequency scaling - which is basically automated overclocking to manage power and temperature; a properly designed "on-chip" stack; four conditional flags for zeros, parities, carries, and signs; it also sports a CLA adder whereas my CPU has a classic ripple-carry-adder. The 8008 had ar...

During the summer of 2019, I began mowing yards to help my brothers fund a summer leadership conference. The work was nostalgic, it reminded me of when my dad did landscaping and lawn care a couple years ago. The work inspired me to try starting a company of my own which is the reason for this project. I can't help but pursue ideas that might lead to a more efficient system. I guess that could also be called laziness (I consider this my greatest strength and a pain in the butt). In this case, this system may not be the most efficient, but I believe its progress in that direction. I want to build a "drone" mower with a range of 10 miles. I believe the only way to achieve the required range with visual feedback is with a web server (and hopefully a 5g connection eventually), latency is going to be the biggest problem; however, Starship technologies seems to have found a solution with their food delivery robots. I worked out a couple of designs in fusion 360 around ...

The build: https://youtu.be/wCKQX6H1vj0 I'm currently enrolled in Physics 2426 and I am fascinated with the material. We recently covered some material on magnetic fields and transformers, so why not take the time to build a tesla coil? But I've got a bit of an issue, I don't have the materials, or any money. I do have two MOTs I could wire in series and maybe get 33Kv - That would be sick - but I don't have much time, and the whole project would be pretty sketch. So I found an alternative: The slayer exciter, I don't need a particularly high power supply to get a little bit of plasma and light up some fluorescent bulbs, and I have everything I need to throw one together real quick. I did a couple of calculations before I started building; However, due to the time constraints I didn't get much down before I started. I knew the the longest piece of 1-1/4 PVC I had was about 27mm and based on the diameter of the wire (0.27 mm), I could get ...