https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/ Recent content in Posts on ZGAF Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us © 2016. All rights reserved. Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/self-driving-car-gtav-part-2/ Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/self-driving-car-gtav-part-2/ Lane Detection An important component of our self driving car architecture is the ability to detect lanes and road lines on the road. We could probably train a convolutional nueral network to drive without object detection or lane detection but our dataset would likely have to be massive. Surely it can’t be that difficult right? Right?…. Hough Transform Ideally we can detect the lines on the road without machine learning. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/self-driving-car-gtav-part-1/ Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/self-driving-car-gtav-part-1/ Introduction This is a project I’ve been wanting to tackle for a long time. I became inspired from Sentdex’s “Python Plays GTA” series on youtube where he trains a tensorflow model to drive a car in GTA V with python. This series was released 7 years ago and there have been significant advancements in python’s speed and object detection models. Lets try to make our own! Goals for this series: https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-4/ Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-4/ Introduction The long awaited final entry to the ROV build log. I doubt this will be the last post about the ROV but for now it is in a operational state. Frame Modifications I was unhappy with how difficult it was to physically move the ROV around. There was a lot of empty space between most of the pressure housings and the top of the frame. This resulted in me taking a few inches out of the height of the frame and squishing everything closer together. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/rg353m/ Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/rg353m/ RG353M I recently got into hand held gaming emulators and picked up a Anbernic RG353M. This little device can run almost any emulator from NES up to PSP. The Novelty quickly wear off though when trying to play 3d games, and I became frustrated with how un ergonomic the device was. I then got the idea to use it as a dedicated console for my tv and play via a wireless playstation 4 controller. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/tracking-space-objects/ Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/tracking-space-objects/ Introduction I’m in the process of building a long range FPV plane (article to come eventually) and one part of the radio link that always fascinated me was the antenna tracker. This setup will utilize a highly directional antenna for the telemetry link but the problem is the plane will always be changing locations. How can we make sure the antenna is always pointed at the right location? The solution is to use the plane location data from the telemetry log and compare it with the location of our antenna. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/restoring-old-games-dll-proxy/ Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/restoring-old-games-dll-proxy/ Introduction I’m back and Happy 2023! It certainly has been a while. I’ve recently been attempting to do more low level learning and discovered a way to keep myself interested long enough to actually learn something by hacking one of my favorite games. Megaman Legends was a ps1 and n64 game that was also released in Japan on pc. Unfortunately the game is only in Japanese and fullscreen only. This is an effort to fix some of these quality of life issues in the game while also learning the basics of game hacking in general. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/dynmap-sql-backend-with-fabric/ Wed, 29 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/dynmap-sql-backend-with-fabric/ Introduction I run a few Minecraft servers for my Discord and utilize a plugin called Dynmap. This plugin allows players to view the world map in their browser and see where other players are at. Dynmap takes the minecraft world file and renders tiles for the web app and stores them on disk. I recently discovered that Dynmap “supports” writing its map render files to a mysql database which I thought was pretty cool. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/a-solar-powered-weather-station-pt2/ Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/a-solar-powered-weather-station-pt2/ Introduction I want to say first off that the weather station has been running for over a year and a half now with zero intervention on my part 🎉. This is not to say though that everything has been smooth sailing. I’ve actually had more issues with the API/Database side of things which is what this post is going to address. Ok, so the content of this post won’t actually address any problems (It most definitely will create several more) but I like to convince myself I am being productive. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-3/ Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-3/ Introduction Ohh boy its been a minute but progress is being made! This post will be a little longer than the others and also picture heavy, you’ve been warned! We last left off assembling the battery and testing. The battery has been finished and the BMS (Battery Management System) wired up and installed. Additionally most of the electronics have been mounted, ballast system fleshed out, and a fancy cover for everything printed. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/failed-project-logs-a-diy-sbc/ Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/failed-project-logs-a-diy-sbc/ Introduction Around sometime in 2019 I was doing a lot of projects with the raspberry pi and got to thinking to myself; how hard would it be to make my own from scratch? I considered myself fairly competent with electrical theory (for a hobbyist) and had some experience in pcb fabrication. So I got to researching if any others had attempted similar feats. I quickly stummbled upon George Hiulliards linux powered business card and became so inspired I decided to give it a go myself (His write up can be found here https://www. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-2/ Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov-part-2/ Introduction If you read part 1 the rov has a frame, motors, and a housing for the electronics. The next issue to address is the power supply. I’ve been looking at doing a battery based on the 18650 cell for some time and finallly found a cheap supplier for 18650 cells. I grabbed a bunch of modem batteries from https://batteryhookup.com/ and got to work. Battery Design The ESC’s (Electronic Speed Controllers) for the thrusters are rated for 11. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov/ Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/lets-build-an-rov/ Introduction First post of 2021! So its been a while since the last post on the blog and I’ve started on a few new projects. One of them is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and that is build a proper ROV. With the advent of the raspberry pi and easy access to code the past few years this project was something that seemed more feasible than before and I decided to dive in head first (pun intended). https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/a-solar-powered-weather-station-pt1/ Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/a-solar-powered-weather-station-pt1/ Introduction ⛈️ We made it on Hackaday! https://hackaday.com/2020/07/13/solar-weather-station-listens-for-lightning/ First Post of 2020! Its been a while but I have been working on quite a few projects lately. Out of all the projects I’m working on, the one I’m most excited for is reviving my solar powered weather station. This was something I started back in 2017 but after some hardware failures (due to lightning strikes) I lost interest in continuing the project. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/adventures-in-pseudorandomness/ Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/adventures-in-pseudorandomness/ Introduction This all started with a discord bot I was building for friends. I was thinking of neat features to add when I found someone post a “star field” in another discord server. I thought it would be fun to have a algorithm that could generate random star fields on demand. Achieving this was fairly simple but got me thinking, is it possible to force the algorithm to generate a star field from a seed value? https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/rocket-league-goal-detection/ Sun, 06 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/rocket-league-goal-detection/ Introduction This project came from the idea of how cool it would be to have a led strip behind my monitors flash when my team made a goal in rocket league. From the surface, with a little bit of help from a tool called Cheat Engine this seemed like a fairly straight forward task. After trying many different methods of finding the memory address that keeps your team score this quickly proved to be much harder than I had originally hoped. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/building-a-zipfile-cracker-in-golang/ Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/building-a-zipfile-cracker-in-golang/ Disclaimer, I am not a professional programmer. Everything in this article was done as a learning exercise and could possibly be done better in many ways. Success with this code is not guaranteed! main.py This project originally started a long time ago after reading Violent Python. For those not familiar, Violent Python is a book about using python for hacking, pentesting, and forensic analysis. In this book there was a simple script on how to crack a zip file using a wordlist in python (https://github. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/python-orm-with-sqlalchemy/ Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/python-orm-with-sqlalchemy/ Introduction Building custom queries for your database can be time consuming and complex. Object-Relational Mapping is a concept designed to ease this burden and make code easier to read. The job of an ORM is to take our data objects and take care of the heavy lifting for us. Today we will utilize the built in ORM features of the SqlAlchemy library for python. Installing sqlalchemy pip install sqlalchemy Declarative Base From within sqlalchemy we will utilize something called declarative_base. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/local-development-with-dynamodb/ Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/local-development-with-dynamodb/ DynamoDB Core Concepts A little theory behind DynamoDB and NoSQL. DynamoDB does not implement a sql like language and how it stores data is fundamentaly different. Data is stored in the form of JSON documents and “fields” can be arbitrary (More on this later). DynamoDB has 3 core components: Tables - This is a collection of our json documents. Here our data will share common attributes (but we are not limited to pre-defined attributes). https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/search-engine-optimization/ Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/search-engine-optimization/ Introduction The biggest struggle for new blogs or websites can be getting viewers. Gaining an audience or community can be a long process that can sometimes take years. So how do you quickly get legitimate users to visit your site? Welcome to the concept of Search Engine Optimization. The idea of SEO is making modifications or optimizations to your website so that it is likely to be returned when people search for a topic. https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/serverless-go-api/ Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://zerogravityantfarm.com/post/serverless-go-api/ Introduction In this tutorial we will install Amazon Web Services SAM(Serverless Application Model) for local go api development. This will allow us to test and debug our code without incurring any cost for AWS services. Before we get started you will need to install the aws-sam, docker, and golang. The scope of this tutorial will be limited to macOS and assuming you already have docker and golang installed. First we will install the aws-sam-cli with brew.