Rahul Kanna

- A 21st century implementation of Open Sesame from Ali Baba and Forty Theives!

Most of the apartment communities in big cities in US are gated community, residents need a secure key fob to open the car or building door to enter. Guests who are visiting residents need to call the resident from the directory phone in front of the apartment, so that the resident can open the door remotely from their phone after verifying who is visiting them.

I also stay in a gated community with two other roommates with friends from outside visiting often. So when our friends are visiting us, they would call twice, one from the car door and one from building door to let them in. It was getting cumbersome to take call for each one of them and then press a key to open the door. Also, when my friends are visiting and when they call from directory, it goes to my roommates as it’s his number which has been added to directory and he should be available to answer the call, otherwise I need to go downstairs to open the door. Also another problem is, sometimes we won’t receive call because there is no signal and friends would be waiting outside for someone to let them in and it would be pretty frustrating for them.

So to avoid all this and to make life easier, I created a solution called The Magic Door!

What does this do?

Instead of using one of our numbers in the directory, I created a new phone through Twilio which can be managed programmatically and we have added this number to the directory of our apartment. So when someone calls, we don’t need to answer the call, it is answered automatically by the phone which is running on the server.

It says:

Hello there!

>Press 0 to enter pin.

>> Please enter pin

>>> Correct Pin?

>>>> Send signal to open the door

>>> Incorrect Pin?

>>>> Start over

>Press 1 to call <Friend1>

>> Call <Friend1> phone

> Press 2 to call <Friend2>

>> Call <Friend2> phone

…

Now this new phone acts as the interface between us and our visiting friends. Visitors depending on whom they are visiting, can choose whom to call by the pressing the appropriate key. Also, the cool part is, to our close friends who are visiting often, we created a secret pin which we share with them and by entering that pin, the door open automatically or magically if you like : D So now, we receive call only if someone new is visiting and also the one whose friend is visiting would get the call.

Doesn’t this create a security problem by opening the door automatically?

The secret pin is shared only with our close friends and this can be changed easily by editing a file in the server. So we can create a new pin, every other week or a special pin for a party night and share it with our friends.

How reliable is this? What if the server goes down?

It is pretty reliable, but sometimes if the server goes down, then we would have to go down to open the door or call the leasing office to change the number in the directory. To avoid this, I created a another layer of interface with Google Voice. We have a Google Voice number which is added to the directory and the Google Voice would forward the call to the Twilio number. When the Twilio server or my server goes down, I just need to change the forwarding number from Google Voice and I would receive the call. Once the server is up, I can change it back to the Twilio number.

Just wanted to try something like this and Twilio is uber cool to control phone programmatically.  Also,  its cool to know that all the key presses on cell phones to make calls are nothing but DTMF signals which are basically sounds from particular frequency. So I just used this by playing a sound to interact with Google Voice and the directory phone.

PS: If you are also facing some problem like this and want someone to help you out, just ping me @ njrahulkanna at gmail.com.

Friends Visualization + Search > Friends Vizearch

Created this Facebook app to visualize friends in a world map based on their current location. This is utility as well as fun app where it can be used to search for friends location, see friends in a location you are travelling to or just to see where all in the world you have friends. It uses Facebook SDK and Google Maps to visualize the data in the world.

Hitler conquered the world with force, lets conquer the world with friends! Check out where all in the world you have friends using Vizearch.

This was a project done as part of Information Visualization course at Virginia Tech with 3 other project members. We came up with a novel approach to create a tool to analyse large amount of intelligence data by combining visualization and collaboration. We created various visualization for the data as well enabled analyst to collaborate their analysis using the visualization tools we created.

Paper on VizCept which was presented at VAST conference.

I have created a GTalk bot to find next available bus for Blacksburg Transit buses in Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. BTransit buses are frequently used by students in Virginia Tech to commute across the Town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech campus. So I thought a GTalk bot which can tell next available bus time will be useful to many students and so here it is.

To use the bot, add the following user to your friends list in GTalk.

GTalk Id: bt.timechecker.bot<at>gmail<dot>com

Usage: Route=<bus_route>

Once you add, the user bot will be online and you can interact with it as a normal friend. To find next available bus, type in the command “Route=<bus_route>”, <bus_route> being the bus you want the schedule for. Currently though it will support only Tom Creek’s A bus route (<bus_route>: TCA). I hope to add other routes data soon. It will fetch you next available bus time based on the current date and time and display it.

This is done as part of my project in Network Architecture Protocol course. But actually, I got the idea of doing something like this in my last semester course User Interface Software, where we were evaluating VoiceXML and how users can manage and access data easily. That time I thought of doing it as voice interface but dint get through. So now since I got an opportunity, I have implemented that idea in a GTalk bot. I also know of an iPhone application which can find the schedule of BT buses.

Hope this bot will be useful, please leave your comments on what you think.

Disclaimer: This bot is unofficial and no way related to Blacksburg Transit company. This is just done as an experiment personally, use at your own risk!

Created this fully functional Snake game in 2nd year of under graduate in C++. This is single player game where the objective is to maneuver the snake to collect food and points. The game is customizable with various options like level of diffculty, mazes etc. Cheat codes and top scorer list are available to make the game interesting.

Download

I created this game during the FIFA 2006  World Cup. This is a single player football game which enthralls its player with its sound and interface. The player steps into the shoes of Fabien Bartez, the French goal keeper and save the goals from ever attacking Brazilian side. It is written in Python.

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This project was done as a final year project with a teammate. This is a system to efficiently communicate video and voice over the Internet. The system is built in Java over the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and it uses Java Media Framework (JMF) for streaming audio and video.