Carl Domingo

Hello Arduino

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

The first thing to do any time you pick up a new language is a classic “Hello World” statement. In the hardware world, the equivalent is making an LED blink. An extremely easy, but initially daunting task. I actually burned out my first LED when I tried it on my breadboard. That was exhilarating. It also smelled horrible.

Video courtesy of TechTeacher

The really awesome thing about Arduino is the sheer simplicity it takes to create anything. It doesn’t take any in depth understanding of programming to do anything, and it helps lower the barrier of entry to understanding hardware and electronics. It is a fantastic tool to start learning about working with hardware. It’s also a big plus that you don’t have to get a soldering kit and have to learn how circuitry works too. I probably would’ve burned my apartment down.

So, to up the ante, I wanted to blink not one…NOT TWO…NOT THREE…BUT SIX LEDS. I wanted to make the LEDs light up in really cool ways. There are four main blink states. In the first state, all 6 LEDs light up at the same time. In the second, the first 2 lights, the second 2 lights, and the third 2 lights light up. In the third, the first of each 3 light up, then the second of each 3. Finally, for the last state, each LED lights up at random.

The LEDs are controlled by a button that switches between the different light arrays. There is also a potentiometer that alters the speed of the blink cycles.

Overall, it was a fun way to get started in the magical world of Arduinos and hardware. We’ll see what projects we can come up with next!

codeRIT

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello all!

With hackathon season in full force right now, I figured it would be a great time to tell you about my work this year with codeRIT.

We started this organization with the purpose of learning about and attending collegiate hackathons. It all began after one of my buddies came back from Penn Apps last semester. I found it ridiculous that at a school with at least 10 different computing organizations from game development to CTF hacking, not a single one had a very big emphasis on hackathons.

We decided to change that and give people the opportunity to go to Penn Apps or MHacks or any other hackathon, so that they could apply what they learned, learn something new, or just make something awesome. We strive to teach people some cool new tech and software, so that they can use it in a hack they make. We give them some helpful tips and tricks to use, so they are better prepared for their next hackathon. Most of all, we have established a community, so that any hacker, new or veteran, can share their love of hacking and make insane projects.

Currently, we are gearing our efforts towards organizing our own hackathon for next spring. In the coming weeks, we are looking to push out weekly content for our fellow hackers, so that we can help out the hacker newbies, show people how to develop for iOS or Android, and do some demos and post mortems of projects made at different hackathons.

My team’s project Agentada from Big Red

Being new, we have a lot of work to do to serve our community and make it awesome. We’ve had a few members attend some hackathons this season and are looking to send people to many more. We want to show people why hackathons are awesome and get them as excited as we are!

Hackathon Season

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello all!

Hackathon season has rolled around, and it’s just a constant buzz of all the crazy things being thought up and created. Currently, Hack GT, Unhackathon, and Hack the North are all going on. Last weekend, a few of my friends and I took a trip down to Penn Apps and got a chance to befriend the guys behind LeapVR DJ. It’s definitely a fun time when the Kent Staters are around.

If you’ve never been to a hackathon before, the experience is 300% worth it. Even if you don’t make the next revolutionary software like Fuji, just the opportunity to try something new and learn something you’ve never done before is valuable. This time around, I spent my time making a simple little app in Swift, just to get a handle of it. Coming up this weekend at Big Red Hacks, my team is going to try our hand at quadcopters, just like one of our friends had done last weekend with Twitch Flies Drone.

Being my first big hackathon, it was a pretty fun, crazy experience. I met some old friends and made some new ones and had a chance to meet some really cool people. I managed to snag a selfie with Swift, the commissioner of Major League Hacking, an organization that I am super excited to work with this year, as RIT’s MLH Coach.

The entire event was packed in the Engineering building at Penn. There were around 1200 attendees from all over the nation and even internationally. The building itself was just a constant flow of people working on insane projects. I even got to see a few myself on the floor of demo hall. Inside of the Palestra, teams were packed in, so that everyone had a chance to show off what they made.

And as an ode to the original collegiate hackathon, some of the projects being showcased were just insane. One of the coolest that caught my eye was PokeMMOn, which was everything my childhood self dreamed of - an MMO Pokemon game that allowed you to be able to play the game, but also challenge other players that are in the world. Unfortunately, they took it down, but hopefully it’ll be up again soon!

Another really awesome hardware hack was the Magic Board.

The video speaks for itself.

If you’ve ever wanted to experience the insanity and creativity of the Computing community, hackathons are the way to go. This weekend, we’ll be traveling down to Cornell for Big Red. This fall, there’s a hackathon happening every weekend, so if you happen to find one happening at a college near your home, you should definitely make a trip to attend it!

Circular Studios

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello again!

With the start of the year, Circular Studios has started ramping up development again. You can find blogs from devs Colden and Dan about the vision of Circular and some major features of our Dash Engine. They’re great starting points to learn what we’re about and what we do.

We’ll be going heavily into finishing and polishing our game Spectral Robot Task Force. Our engine for the most part is done, at least to a point where we can use it. We started on the game last semester and reached a good alpha stage. We actually demoed it at our school’s major innovation festival, Imagine RIT, last year. We had a lot of good feedback, and people seemed really interested in our game and the engine.

This semester is dedicated to the big final reveal of our year of work. We soft launched the engine to the public last semester and were met with some major accomplishments. At one point, we were part of the top trending GitHub repos and had reached the top of r/gamedev and r/programming. There was quite a lot of buzz around the D community as well.

We’re going to show what we’re made of by the end of the year - a bunch of dedicated, talented students with an awesome product to boot. As our engine team finishes the last of the features for Dash, our game team will be working diligently to make sure that we have an awesome game to show off.

As for me, I’ll be making sure that every one is talking about this game by the end of December. Within the next few weeks, our websites will be revamped and better showcase some of the cool content we’re making. I’ll also try to build up our community through our various media outlets and hopefully some fun dev podcasts. This year will prove to be a lot of work, but it will definitely be a lot of fun.

If you’ve got any questions or interest in Circular or Dash, feel free to reach out. Next up will be a recap of the start of my hackathon season and an awesome trip down to Penn.

Carl, out

Welcome Back

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello all!

Following the first week of classes, this is proving to be a very exciting semester full of projects and hackathons. Coming up in a few weeks is Big Red Hacks in Cornell, where I’ll hopefully be able to make my very first app in Swift.

Being a self-proclaimed iOS programmer, jumping into Swift is proving to be a very cool experience. It was long overdue for Apple to have a new programming language, and Swift is really showing some neat new features. One of my personal favorites is the ease of string concatentation. In my experience with iOS, you needed to call a message on the string you would want to concatenate with the string you want to add as a parameter. It was a very long and unncessary process.

Now, in Swift, they have impleneted a very cool feature such as:

var string1 = “world” var string2 = “Hello, (string1)!”

which will actually print “Hello, world!”

Another very interesting addition is making the language more losely typed, such as a language like JavaScript. It still utilizes classes, structs, and enums, but for variables the compiler can actually infer that string1 would be a string. It can do the same thing with Ints, Doubles, etc., as long as you give it a literal when you first create a variable. They’ve also removed the necessity of semi-colons, which is useful, I suppose. It saves time having to write and check semi-colons all the time at least.

An addition that I personally find a bit confusing is the way a variable is declared. Take for example:

var number: Int

Instead of the classic “int number;”, it is now a little more involved. It makes sense, considering the attempt to be more loosely typed, but I guarantee that I’ll probably forget to do declare a variable at some point.

By far, the coolest addition to the new language is the introduction of Xcode Playground. Essentially, it shows you the output of what you’ve made as you type it. I think it’s a really cool feature, because you don’t have to spend half an hour writing code, which ends up breaking when you run it. You can see the functionality of the methods and statements as you write it, and if something unexpected happens, you can fix it on the fly.

But that’s enough of Swift from me today. Hopefully, I’ll have a really cool Swift app to show at the end of the semester. Stay tuned, because I’ll be going over the cool stuff happening at Circular Studios and the Dash Engine next week.

Carl, out

Finding Ideas in Unlikely Places

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello again, friends!

In this edition of my blog, I present to you some help in getting your creative juices flowing, so that you can make some awesome project. It’s mostly inspired by this article by Tobias van Schneider, Design Lead at Spotify.

While working as a contractor making a website this summer, I’ve been rather starved doing iOS app development, something that I really enjoy doing. Sure, making a website is pretty cool, especially when you are in control of the entire process, and it has definitely helped in pushing me to revamp my personal website. The problem is that it just isn’t iOS.

In an attempt to “get back in the game,” I’ve been doing some light reading on Swift for when I finally upgrade to Yosemite and iOS 8, and going over some of my text books on iOS programming and app development. I just had not found a reason to actually make something. I found myself in a creative rut that was very hard to get out of.

After reading that article, I had a stroke of inspiration. All you really need is a little bit of dumb, crazy idea, and you can do just about anything. Even if it is something that doesn’t really make sense to anybody but yourself, it may as well be a good idea.

Currently, I only have two ideas in my book, but it’s a much better start than where I was a month ago. Now, I can at least start making something and really get the creative juices flowing. Even if they amount to nothing, it will be a much better way to spend my time, than not actually doing anything at all. Maybe they’ll even push me towards an even dumber idea?

The Steam Sale and Good Ol' Games

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello, again friends! This week’s blog is inspired by the Steam Summer Sale. If you haven’t heard of it, then obviously you don’t use a PC to play games. It’s arguably the best (and worst) time to buy any PC game, because there are just so many on sale. In fact, I’ve spent way more than I would like to admit on a lot of games, a few of which I know I will probably barely ever touch. But it does give me a nice chance to speak about WHY I bought these games in the first place.

One of the best things about the sale is the fact that everything is so much cheaper than it would normally be. The fact that I can buy the entire Skyrim Package for $14, as opposed to $100 on console is such a major factor in my purchases. It also gives me a great chance to lookout for games that I’ve really been looking to play in the past year. Maybe, I can actually finish Skyrim, or get a chance to experience Dishonored, or have a really good reason to buy Transistor or South Park: Stick of Truth. I can finally brush up on my repertoire of companies and games and really dig into all of the cool designs and mechanics that have come up in the past year.

Now, with it being the summer and having tons of free time, I was able to finish Stick of Truth in less than 24 hours. If you think that’s shameful, I finished Game of Thrones, start to finish, in four days. It didn’t take me a day because I was bored or had nothing to do. It actually spoke to the fact that Stick of Truth was an AMAZING game. While lacking in some aspects of RPG elements, it created a very refreshing experience, a new look into how RPGs can be done. While using age old tactics of picking an ability to use against your enemy, it became more interactive by a simple addition of pressing buttons to engage in those skills. A well timed attack could achieve maximum damage with a little more on top.

On the side, I’ve started playing arguably the most frustrating rogue-like, Rogue Legacy. In my opinion, it is one of the most unforgiving games I’ve ever played. I must have died at least 20 times before I started getting a hold of everything. It really forces you to find a style that works for you, so that you can get enough money to buy something, let alone survive. Even though I’m pretty terrible at the game, it somehow manages to drag me back in to die at the hands of spikes and fireballs.

Whether it be awesome AAA titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts or Saints Row IV, the biggest indie games like Broken Age and Transistor, or just a fun little pick me up playing The Sims or a Lego game, the Steam sale is best time to get the games you’ve been craving or to try something new. But, be warned: too many cheap games could leave your wallet worse for wear!

Carl, Out

The Great Debate

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Hello again friends!

This week is brought to you by E3(unofficially). One of the biggest struggles of my career has been the age-old debate of “Console vs PC.” On occasion, when this debate stirs, I always hear at least one “PC Master Race!” or “XBOX rules!”

If you had asked my high school self, I would tell you that console gaming was the way of the future. And at the time, it had really seemed so. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t pick up my 360 controller and play at least a game or twenty of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (aka CoD 4). Up until sophomore year of college, you couldn’t separate me from my 360. It is because of that console that I chose to go to a school to make video games for a living. Games back then were my entire life, and have shaped who I am today.

I ended up building my first gaming rig to play the much anticipated Guild Wars 2, and slowly became enveloped in the world of Steam games, being swept up by the incredible amount of Steam sales that made my wallet cry. At points, it seemed a definitive choice that I would never touch my console ever again. In fact, one of the only games that has made me really want a console game this past year is GTA V, which took me 2 months after buying it to actually play it.

Now, in the world of changing guards, the PS4 and the XBOX One are the new “thing” for consoles. The problem is that they are just so expensive. It has become seemingly unwarranted to buy a new console for a handful of games like Destiny or Battlefield. Nowadays, most of my friends play on PC, so why would I go buy a new console to play with nobody?

It has become a personal existential gaming crisis. Especially, in a point of my life where money is precious, it just becomes impossible to even buy some games for the PC. Where would I be now without the consoles of old? How can I justify paying an extra $500 for one or two games to come?

Now, how does any of this relate to E3 at all? Because, E3 is the epicenter of all things gaming in North America. It represents all factions, from the major console companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, to the publishers like Activision and EA. It represents my past, present, and (hopefully) future. It is important to me both as a consumer and as a professional. How can I claim to be knowledgeable in my craft if I can’t even stay up to date on current trends? By limiting myself to one platform, there’s no way I’ll be able to experience the best content from all aspects of the gaming world.

All personal struggles aside, E3 showed some really cool content to come. A few sneak peaks into the new Star Wars: Battlefront 3 (finally) and Mass Effect 4 were a few games I’ve been waiting for a long time. Another look into Project Spark from Microsoft was especially cool, since one of the developers is actually an alumnus from both my college AND high school.

The coming years could arguably be one of the most influential revolutions in the gaming world. With so much cool content and amazing technology coming out, it will prove to be an exciting time. For a better look into some of the biggest headlines at E3 this year, check out Polygon for the best news in gaming.

Carl, Out

Welcome!

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Welcome to my official blog, sponsored by myself! Here you’ll find me talking about most of anything, but usually something developer related. Maybe, you’ll find a blog about the Dash Engine, a game engine by an indie game studio that I am a part of, Circular Studios. Or perhaps, I’ll speak about Apple’s next big thing, like the Swift Programming Language.

There’s really no telling what I’ll talk about, because it’ll be whatever I choose. Why? Because this is my blog, and nobody can tell me what to do. In the words of Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, I’m going to do this “without their permission.”

On a closing note, that reminds me that Net Neutrality is quickly becoming a thing of the past. While I’ve never much bothered with politics, Net Neutrality is something that is extremely important to users of the Web everywhere, from your grandmother to the developers behind every website. By allowing major cable companies to be able to control who gets access to what, it’s vastly limiting the potential of the internet. Where would the internet be now, if it had not been for those developers that started making crummy website with flashing text and animating word art text? They probbably evolved to become the future of the web, those who forged forward to make access to information easier for all.

If you want to learn more about Net Neutrality, and help fight for it check out Save The Internet.

Carl, Out