Copeland Royall

With each blog post on this site, I’ve made an effort to not only explore new areas of engineering and computer science, but also to try to increase the technical level of the topics covered. Continuing with this trend, the latest project I’ve been working on is by far the most complex yet; I’ve decided to build a self driving car. Because of the amount of time it will take me, I will be posting the project in multiple parts. In this post I’ll cover the vehicle platform I have chosen. I spent a good deal of time creating the specifications I would need for the foundations of my car. Now, I obviously do not have the financial, legal or intellectual means to create an autonomous automobile out of a full size vehicle, so I had to consider the alternatives. I could either build a chassis from scratch, giving me great control over its design and capabilities, or I could buy a remote control car and convert it for my use. I concluded that building the vehicle from scratch would be far t...

Something I haven’t yet covered on this blog is my interest in Android. Since ~2011 I’ve been modifying and tweaking my phones to make them more unique to my needs. This began with rooting my Sony Xperia SP using TowelRoot, an incredibly easy way to grant elevated privileges on Sony phones from that time period. In case you’ve never heard the term ‘root’ or ‘jailbreak’ before, here’s the basics. An operating system, like Android or Windows, has a certain directory structure that must always be kept the same. On Windows, this structure originates from your local disk (C: partition). This is where everything is stored on the computer unless you have multiple internal drives. Within this main disk is C:\, which is the first directory inside the drive. All of the other folders in the OS originate from here. For instance, the Downloads folder in my PC is located at C:\Users\copey\Downloads\. All operating systems will store their data in a similar way. The contents of my C:\ drive ...