This thing is awesome! There is not enough room on this page to express how great this product is. My first and only experience with VR was at a Maker Faire booth, to which the VR was connected with wires to a PC and was HUGE on my head. I had never been able to get a VR headset because all of them needed a PC connection, which I didn’t have or want.

So when I saw that Oculus came out with a new headset that was completely wireless, I was very excited to get one. The one I got had 256 GB of storage and I got the extra head strap to make it more comfortable on my head. From the second you put it on, you are immersed into the world of VR in extremely high quality.

The games I would recommend to get are Rec Room, Population One, Beat Saber, VR Paint, and Iron Lights. I love how you can connect with your friends and play games with them virtually. Especially now during COVID where you can’t see your friends as much, a VR headset is a great way to hang out safely.

Oculus also makes it really easy to develop games too. I started to use unity to program my own VR games and Oculus’s API made it seamless to upload my creations to the headset.

I would highly recommend this product for any ages and it is a great quarantine gift.

One of the things in tech that I have always been intrigued by are 3D printers. I am fascinated by how they can take in a 3D model and automatically print a 3D object.

I knew I wanted to get one to be able to print cases for my other tech projects. I could use it for an updated smart glasses or as a chassis for another object detection car.

I decided to get the ender 3D pro and wanted to share my thoughts on it.

It is a great printer, but I would not recommend it for very precise work. Some of my prints that I make a certain size on my computer do not print the same size on the printer. I would rate the quality of the prints at an 8/10 because they are very good prints, but they lack fine precision. Another qualm I have about it is that you have to level the bed yourself, which may take a lot of trial and error and if not done properly, can lower the print quality. I did enjoy that you had to put it together yourself, though. It was a fun process to build it. I also like how you can easily change the color filament for different prints.

Something I recently used this printer for was to encase an updated version of my object detection robot car. You can see the black chassis which holds all the tech below:

I would recommend this printer to young hobbyists who want to use it for simple projects or figurines.

This summer, I was unfortunately limited in what I could do because of the pandemic. I had been thinking of what to do and I knew I wanted to teach something to someone. So, I had the idea to run a woodworking class for young kids.

I advertised my summer business on Facebook and was getting weekly customers who wanted their kids to have something to do over the summer. Now that I had a few groups a day, I needed to come up with 4 projects, one for each week of the month. Each project needed to involve woodworking and appeal to a variety of ages.

One of my ideas was for the kids to make a corn hole set. I had not realized that a simple corn-hole making activity would involve the amount of work that it took to finally put together. I first had to get the dimensions of a kids-size corn hole board and figure out how much it would cost to get each board for each kid in each group. I then had to decide how the board was going to stand. I wanted the legs to be able to swivel in for easy storage so I decided to use long bolts to attach the wooden legs. Then, for beanbags, I initially wanted to buy them in bulk, but I realized it would be less costly if I just made them myself. So I went to the fabric store and bought a few yards of fabric. I cut out 3×3 inch squares and used a sewing machine to sew 3 sides, put 1/3 cup of dry rice in the bag, and then sewed the remaining side.

Once I had all my materials, I started to make individual kits for each kid. Each kit had one board, two legs, two bolts, 4 nuts, 4 washers, 3 beanbags, a piece of sandpaper, and paintbrushes and paint to decorate.

I repeated this process with other projects such as an easel, a tic tac toe board, and a toolbox.

After completing a month of this, I realized how much I learned. I learned valuable skills in teaching, problem-solving, business development, working with kids, and communication through this process. It also was extremely rewarding to teach other people.

When the pandemic initially hit, everyone was sent into a state of lockdown. We were limited in the amount of time we could leave the house for necessities: food and water. With empty supermarket shelves being the norm, we needed to find a better way to get food into the house. My dad and I began looking at alternatives for growing food inside without having to use too many extra resources. We found that hydroponic indoor gardens would be the most efficient way to solve our problem.

Hydroponics

Hydroponic planting is an alternative way to grow crops, using a water solution for the roots of the plants to develop in rather than traditional soil. This method allows you to better control the environment the plant grows in and the type and amount of nutrients it receives. Also, hydroponics allows you to grow them in any environment which was a key reason for choosing this method of planting.

We began to experiment with hydroponics using mason jars to hold the system while keeping them in the basement. The structure of the system is a jar filled with pure, filtered water up until it barely reaches the slotted cup container at the lid. In the cup, there are clay pebbles below coconut coir- which is soil-like material made from the husk of a coconut- topped with a few buried seeds covered in water so the coconut coir is moist. We have used different nutrients in the water to control what the plants receive.

We are planning on expanding this hydroponic garden to a less experimental and more permeant structure to increase efficiency in our planting.

Another one of my quarantine projects was to recreate the famous Iron Man personal assistant, JARVIS. Through my recent discovery of the programming language python, I wanted to push my abilities and create my own virtual personal assistant, like Alexa or Siri.

Besides my inspiration from the Marvel movies, I also wanted to create this project for privacy reasons. Nowadays, all the giant tech companies have their own personal assistant: Amazon has Alexa, Apple has Siri, and Microsoft has Cortana. All these virtual assistants, while great at helping people, have their own privacy flaws. These flaws can take advantage of users and breach their privacy. So, I wanted to challenge myself to create a private, localized personal assistant that anonymously retrieves data from the web, keeping your data private.

I created this program using the SpeechRecognition, PyAudio, and pyttsx3 libraries to handle speech recognition, audio parsing, and text to speech. I also used API’s of different websites to retrieve data, such as wikipedia and the weather.

Some of the tasks JARVIS can do are tell the weather in any US city, translate from English to 5 different languages (French, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian), get Wikipedia information on any topic, tell a joke, and many others.

You can read more about this project here:

https://makeprojects.com/project/jarvis-personal-assistant-weyvg

Over quarantine, I have been creating many STEAM-based projects to keep busy during these hectic times. I read that the Maker Faire was coming back this year virtually, so I decided to enter with one of my projects.

I created smart glasses that told the temperature and depending on how hot or cool it was, the OLED display would read a suggestion for that weather reading. I used an Arduino microcontroller for the brains of the project and connected it to a temperature sensor and a mini OLED display tied together with code I wrote to make the project function.

My aim of entering the project on the maker faire website is to inspire more kids to learn about technology at home and make something with their hands. I believe that understanding technology is important and for me, the easiest way to understand something is to discover it yourself with projects.

You can read more about this project on the maker faire website here: https://makerfaire.com/maker/entry/72136/

When I began to learn how to program, my initial goal was to be able to create a robot: a simple robot that can move around and maybe have some other cool features, like object detection.

I realized that this would not only take me learning code, but also learn about electronics and microcontrollers.

I began to learn about a microcontroller called Arduino and initially created a simple circuit that makes an LED flash when I pressed a button. This simple circuit allowed me to create more complex ones, and I was now able to put my knowledge together to create the robot I always wanted o build.

Some of the parts I used were an Arduino Uno for the brains, an Ultrasonic sensor to measure the distance to the nearest obstruction, an H-Bridge Motor Driver to control the wheels, a Servo, wheels, some wires, and a breadboard.

The basic functions of the robot would be the following steps:

1. Measure the distance to the nearest object in front of the robot
2. Turn the distance sensor to the left and measure, then to the right and measure
3. Whichever distance (front, left, right) read the largest, the robot would move in that direction
4. Repeat

This project taught me a lot about the inner workings and connection between hardware and software.

This summer, I visited the MIT museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This museum was one of the highlights of my trip and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who loved STEAM and is in the Boston area.

One exhibit in particular that stood out to me was the Gestural Engineering Exhibit, showcasing the work and sculpts of Arthur Ganson.

The MIT museum introduces the exhibit as the following:

The work of Arthur Ganson (1955-) brings together the logic of computer programming, the intricacy of surgery, and the expression potential or drawing. His sources or inspiration range from nature and music to found objects and random events.

A self-taught engineer, Ganson began his MIT connection with an exhibit in 1994; during an artist’s residency that following year, he mentored engineering students as they designed “artistic machines”

Ganson uses the principles of mechanics to create “gestures” – physical actions that express feelings and ideas. But he wants viewers to make their own meanings. “With all of these pieces,” he says, “you don’t have to know anything. Everything you feel about them is true – for you.

His many sculptures at first glance look like a genius contraception using mechanical engineering, but on a deeper look, you can feel the meaning behind his pieces.

He creates pieces that bring dull mechanics to life, with each one feeling as though you are watching a fluid animation of mechanics.

To get the flygrip and the app click on the links below

Flygrip: here  Lego Movie Maker: here