Hello, I’m Kaushik Iyer.
CS Masters @ Cornell

This was a personal project on which I worked at during summer 2024. Since a long time I had been wanting to develop a proper project from scratch which was not a youtube tutorial or a walkthrough. All of the ideas for this project were things that I wanted to implement. The whole backend and frontend has been done by myself, and since I like working on backend more, unfortunately the frontend aesthetics and accessibility are not upto the mark. Anyway, the frontend is in React, and backend built in python’s FASTAPI. The scores are regularly updated from a third party API through websockets, the nearby grounds are fetched by using the user’s location and Google Places API. The website also performs Google OAuth 2.0 through the frontend itself. A large part of the project also involved figuring out the hosting aspects, including getting a domain, and hosting the frontend as well as the backend folders. I eventually got a domain free for a year through name.com, hosted the frontend through cloudflare pages in their free tier, and got to host the backend in heroku for 2 years through Github’s Student Developer Pack.

I developed this project during my first semester at Cornell, as a part of my M.Eng Project for the Systems Engineering faculty. This project aims to solve some of the shortcomings of existing greentech technologies such as lack of verifiability and difficulty in tracking orders by leveraging the strengths of blockchain technology and its features of immutability, verifiability, and transparency.

And since this was a part of an academic research paper as well, extensive efforts were put into performance testing of the platform, which included performing load testing under multiple simultaneous users calling computationally intensive functionalities such as create project, and upload images. These tests were performed under different request body sizes and multiple such calls. The test suites and visualizations were custom developed in Python, primarily using modules such as asyncio, locust, and matplotlib for concurrency, load test configurations, and visualizations respectively. These were custom made because Postman’s collection run functionality did not cater to this particular use case.

Developed an innovative healthcare automation system combining robotics and IoT to assist medical staff in routine patient care tasks. The project integrated multiple technologies to create a comprehensive solution for patient monitoring and medication delivery. It is a line following robot, which successfully navigates across ‘+’ junctions, performs a U-turn at the end and starts sensory activity when the finger is placed. The value is updated immediately on the Blynk app’s displays, and then the robot automatically follows the same path back to the starting position.

Technical Components

• Built a line-following robot using Arduino Uno with four IR sensors for hospital navigation
• Integrated a 3-DOF robotic arm controlled by NodeMCU for medication transport
• Implemented vital sign monitoring using MAX30105 (pulse) and MLX90614 (temperature) sensors
• Developed mobile interface using Blynk platform for remote monitoring and control
• Established UART and I2C communication between components

Key Features

• Autonomous navigation through hospital wards
• Real-time vital sign monitoring and data transmission
• Remote control through mobile application
• Automated medication delivery system
• WiFi-enabled data transmission

This project took us more time than expected, since I had no prior experience in working with Arduino, or building robots from scratch, and the other group members also were assigned unfamiliar tasks. But it was a very fruitful experience, especially in the end when we saw the whole bot perform end-to-end operations.