Case study
The (Un)useless Box — a stress-relief toy built from logic gates, a 555 timer, and DC motors — plus an assembly-to-machine-code translator with a behavioural simulator.
The (Un)useless Box was built for 261212 Logic and Digital Circuits Lab (semester 1/2023, Computer Engineering, Chiang Mai University). It is a fidget toy for students: flip a switch and an arm pops out of the box to flip it back. There are three behaviours — left switch, right switch, or both at once, which makes the LEDs blink until one switch is turned off. The control is built from logic gates and a 555 timer rather than a microcontroller. A second project, an assembly-to-machine-code translator with a behavioural simulator, covers the same layers from the software side.
Students under long study sessions reach for their phones to relax. Repetitive, physical actions like flipping a switch relieve stress, so the goal was a toy that replaces screen time — and a way to practise logic design on real hardware.
Team member on the Useless Box (four students); individual implementer of the translator and simulator.
The Useless Box was a four-person team project; design, wiring, and the enclosure were shared. The translator and simulator were individual work.
Digital logic
Hardware integration
Computer architecture
AI / ML
Neural networks written from scratch in NumPy: a backpropagation MLP for flood forecasting and classification, and an MLP trained by a genetic algorithm that reaches 97.5 % accuracy on breast-cancer data.
Infrastructure
An old PC rebuilt as a Proxmox server that runs my live projects and a local LLM on its own GPU, published through Cloudflare Tunnel with Grafana and Dozzle for metrics and logs.
