SeanMcb.com

This page contains a chronological record of various projects that I’ve worked on throughout college. It is currently incomplete, but I continue to add to the list whenever I have time.

You can get the latest copy of my resume here. (Last updated: 2006-02-08)

Junior Year - Spring Semester 2006

• alwaysBETA: Wordpress Powered Group Blog - alwaysBETA is a group variety blog founded by myself and two friends. I designed and implemented the layout with XHTML and CSS, as well as constructing a customized theme to structure the pages from the Wordpress-powered backend.

Junior Year - Fall Semester 2005

• The Blender: Usability Study and Design of a Unique Digital Audio Player - This is a project that I completed for my Human Factors Interface Design course. My team initially began by investigating the interaction of creating playlists, but once we developed personae, we realized that our primary persona didn’t want to create playlists at all. Our project goal transitioned to designing and prototyping a usable and unique digital audio player software interface. Our interface uses intelligent shuffling and the concept of “blending” to give our primary persona what they want: a mix of enjoyable music to listen to.

• Discrete Math: Web Usage Pattern Analysis - Most website traffic analysis systems consider the number of “page hits” or the access count for each page in the site. However, reporting these simple numbers eliminates the context of their place in the overall site visit. Other traffic analysis software can report on paths that individual users take, but do little to summarize this data into a meaningful and useful form. Our goal is to track user visits to a website, which are ordered sequences of page views, and then to extract trends, outliers, and other useful summary information from this data. This project was written in Python.

• Arcade Hardware Design: Building a Hardware Sprite - The goal of this final project for my Computer Architecture course was to investigate the hardware design of old arcade machines like PacMan and possibly implement an existing or custom arcade game on an FPGA. Due to compatibility issues, we eventually narrowed our scope down to implementing our own sprite rendering hardware on an FPGA. Our final deliverables included this website and a working demo of our Verilog code running on an FPGA. The site features photos and a video of the final hardware demo.

Sophomore Year - Spring Semester 2005

• User Oriented Collaborative Design - My design group of three was tasked with designing for vending machine technicians. Throughout the semester we conducted interviews, brainstormed, and refined our ideas and prototypes. By the end, we generated a final prototype of the “Better Box”, a device that makes it easier to load vending machines from a dolly.

Sophomore Year - Fall Semester 2004

• Foundations of Engineering: The Big Knob - Foundations of Engineering was a project class where small groups of students brainstormed, designed, and built USB HID-class devices. My group chose to construct a device called the “Big Knob”, a flexible external input device with an array of buttons, LEDs, and one big knob that can be assigned to press key combinations or execute scripts. One part hardware and one part software, this project gave us a taste of all the factors involved in hardware device design.