Projects
Things I built because the problem would not leave me alone. Source is on GitHub where it exists.
active
Autonomous Air Hockey Robot
Jan 2026 – Present · Project-Ilya
A closed-loop real-time CV pipeline on a Raspberry Pi running at 60 FPS —
HSV masking, Gaussian filtering, centroid tracking, and a homography matrix mapping pixel
coordinates to table coordinates. The C++ motor control loop closes command-to-actuation in
under 20 ms.
Tracking, state estimation, and planning run as separate processes passing packets over UDP,
so motor control stays decoupled from vision. Velocity estimation and trajectory prediction
compute intercepts in real time, driving a CoreXY stepper system that blocks
66% of incoming shots.
PythonOpenCVRaspberry PiC++UDPCoreXY
1st place
Smart Soldering Station
Sep 2025 – Dec 2025
First place in the Penn State Entrepreneurship Competition out of 12 competing teams. Embedded
software controlling fume extraction, PCB positioning, and adaptive lighting driven by
real-time sensor feedback.
Real-time hand gesture recognition with OpenCV and MediaPipe enables touchless control of
5 station functions — fume speed, lighting, PCB rotation — at
94% gesture classification accuracy, with a rule-based gesture layer over
MediaPipe hand tracking and a serial interface to the robot arm.
PythonOpenCVMediaPipeReactRaspberry Pi
1st place
AI Course Scheduler & Advisor
Mar 2024
Won first place at HackPSU Spring 2024 among 50+ teams — a full-stack React/Flask
application using GPT-4 to generate personalized course registration roadmaps.
REST API backend in Flask handling real-time GPT-4 streaming responses, deployed on AWS EC2
with RDS for persistent session storage.
PythonFlaskReactAWS EC2RDS
in progress
Live Translator
May 2026 – Present
A fully offline real-time speech translator: microphone in, translated speech
out, with no cloud round trip. WebRTC VAD gates the audio, faster-whisper handles transcription
and language ID, NLLB-200 on CTranslate2 does the translation, and Piper speaks the result.
Every stage runs in its own thread behind a common interface and communicates over bounded
queues, so models can be swapped — or wrapped as ROS 2 nodes — without touching the
pipeline. Built to migrate from desktop to a Raspberry Pi 5, then a Jetson Orin Nano.
Currently a working scaffold with the pipeline stages in progress.
PythonWhisperNLLB-200CTranslate2Piper TTSJetson
full stack
Spicerack
Aug 2025
A recipe discovery app built around a swipe interface — swipe right to save, left to skip.
A Flask backend scrapes AllRecipes and Food Network with BeautifulSoup and Selenium, then
stores recipes, pantry contents, and ratings in SQLite.
Tracks what is already in your pantry, works out which ingredients are missing from a recipe,
estimates macros from the ingredient list, and hands the gap off to an Instacart cart.
ReactFlaskSQLiteBeautifulSoupSeleniumTailwind
full stack
AI Health Dashboard
Jul 2025
A wellness dashboard that turns self-reported health data into personalized general guidance
using Google Gemini, with a React frontend over a FastAPI backend.
SQLAlchemy and SQLite persist both user input and the advice history, and the API is fully
documented through FastAPI’s generated OpenAPI schema.
ReactFastAPIGeminiSQLAlchemySQLitehttpx