idoakatz22

About idoakatz22

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LED Matrix

Back in June 2020, I created my own LED matrix panel from scratch. I cut up a strip of individually addressable LEDs to create a 16 by 9 panel. I attached them onto a plastic board and soldered the ends together so they can all be controlled by a small ESP-32 Arduino chip.  

Writing the code was challenging but in the end it turned out well. I wrote it in C and I used some public libraries to help me. The biggest challenge was that I couldn’t find any libraries to do what I want. I wanted to be able to input text, and have that scroll across the screen. It took some planning but I ended up assigning each letter to set of vertical columns with certain LEDs on and off. Then, these columns would scroll across the screen with an adjustable screen. 

I also created an android app to control the panel once the code was finished. I used the MIT app inventor, and it connects to the Arduino using Bluetooth. It’s a very basic app, but you can input text, change the colors, and run some other effects. 

Great Problems Seminar

The Great Problems Seminar is a semester long class students take their freshmen year at WPI. It involves doing research on a large real world problem and coming up with a solution. My team wanted to solve post hurricane Maria energy issues in Puerto Rico. We researched mental and physical health problems of living without electricity and narrowed the problem to meet the needs of small families. We conducted interviews with experts and researched potential solutions. Finally, we developed a concept for a cost-effective battery-based solution that would provide energy to sustain small electrical medical devices as well as other electronic devices that will improve the mental health of a hurricane survivor.

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Fandom

Fandom is an idea for an online store centered around celebrity merch created by celebrities themselves and their fans. Users can browse celebrities based on their type of talent, or sub categories within that such as music genre. The website also recommends new celebrities that users might want to check out. 

For this project, I had to create a prototype for the website and plan and run evaluations on the user experience and design. I learned how to run a proper heuristic evaluation to get meaningful feedback from the target user. Using the feedback that I got, I was able to make changes to the layout which ultimately made the website easier to use. 

If you want to check out the prototype, click here.