Work in Progress

Teaser update

I haven't posted in a long time and that is partly because I was busy on some stuff I really want to post here.
So this post is a teaser about projects I hope to finish soon.

Sudoku Solver

The first project is a Sudoku Solver. I have liked Sudoku's for a long time and love to philosophize about some interesting features. I know that making a Sudoku Solver is like a first year's Computer Science assignment, but I decided to try and figure it out by myself without any help from other sources.

So far the program is able to solve what you would call Hard Sudoku's, but not the most difficult ones.
Most puzzles only require you to take away the possibilities to find the answers.
For the hardest Sudoku's you have to take more than one thinking step to find more answers. I have plans to improve the algorithm and I believe it will be able to solve any (solvable) Sudoku.

I've made it in Matlab, which is really handy to work with on your own computer, but not so nice to show to other people across the internet. So I still have to do a lot of work to get it online.

Computer Controlled Boat

My first Arduino project was a Led Cube which was a lot of fun, but I was dying for something new and more challenging. When I found a small RC boat at my work I immediately knew what I wanted to do.
I screwed open the remote control and looked where the buttons were giving their signals. When you place a voltage on the right pins you get the same effect as pressing a button. The Arduino is perfect for that.
You can allow the Arduino to send signals to the remote control depending on some input. We could use the keyboard to control the boat for instance. I decided to use Processing, which is very similar to the Arduino language, to communicate with the Arduino via the USB cable.
The whole setup looks this:

On the left we see the Arduino Uno, on the right the opened remote control and to connect the two we see a breadboard in the middle. On the top we see the boat in question upside down so the rotors can turn while testing.

To make this project completely awesome I'll connect a webcam to my laptop to monitor the position and direction of the boat to make it autonomous.
This project is going pretty well so I hope to finish it in a couple of days.

So stay tuned!