My name is Andrei Agnew. I'm a Computer Science / Software Engineering student at the University of Sydney. I'm also an active musician, as a member of the funk-rock band CHAPERONE and as a leader of the jazz band The Collective Good.
I like tinkering around with things I know nothing about and learning about that thing. It's so incredibly fun and rewarding. I like it a lot.
Here are a couple of things I've worked on.
About 10 years ago, a tool called RaspiMJPEG was developed, allowing Raspberry Pi microprocessors to fetch four simultaneous camera streams from any connected camera. Due to a lack of maintenance, this tool became unsupported across all modern Raspberry Pi's.
The new standard for interfacing with the Raspberry Pi camera is a tool called libcamera, a Raspberry Pi fork of the open source Linux framework of the same name. Notably, this tool places locks on any camera it accesses, removing the possibility of multiple processes reading from the camera simultaneously.
I am currently working on a project called libcamera-async, a fork of Raspberry Pi's libcamera. Its aim is to (safely) restore the multi-stream functionality of the old RaspiMJPEG tool. Mutexes will be the death of me.
At my old job at a certain Australian telecommunications provider, the inventory tracking system was, put bluntly, bad. Once stock was received, we would be expected to count each item every week. This was a punish with the amount of phones we kept on hand, and regularly took much longer than the 15 minutes we were alotted for it. A speed up a lot of stores found was printing custom labels for each phone with barcodes, to allow for a much fasterĀ
In 2020 I was in my final year of high school. In 2020 we had to stay inside. In 2020 I got very bored, very quickly...
I wanted to improve my programming in an engaging way that my friends and I could all interact with. So I cobbled together Barney. It was a phenomenal thrown-in-the-deep-end learning experience, and I had so much fun being completely out of my depth. I did a little write up on its features and the things I learnt over on my GitHub, check it out.
It's completely broken...
I'm in a band called CHAPERONE. It's starting to pick up a bit of traction, and so we needed a website! We also don't like spending money!!!
This is an ongoing project of testing the limits of Google Sites' Embed capability. Our older website had lots of custom code. To use images in funky ways and our self-designed custom font, I had to encode the CSS assets as Base64 strings, as Google Sites offers no direct download hosting options (very cool). I'm sure there are some tools that exist and allow for direct download links, but I found this works faster on Google, is cheaper and is also funnier to talk about.
The old iteration of CHAPERONE's website was taken down by Google, I suspect due to each embed being about 10MB of text-encoded images and the such. A newer, more-Google-friendly version is up now over at https://chaperone.band, with far less bloated embeds.