Ashish Patel

A friend of mine came across Makerbot a little while ago, pretty neat stuff check it out!

Reminds me of our 3D printer project in University.

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Once upon a time, in a far away city, I did some work for the Glenrose Rehabilitiaton Hospital in their Orthopedic Engineering Research Group (OERG). I worked here as a student doing biomedical engineering and building software diagnostic tools brace technology to assist doctors in diagnosing and treating scoliosis patients. This morning I came across an article on the University of Alberta website that talked about some work that I helped start-up back in 2001. The article Engineers at the forefront of medical research talks about a device called the active bracing system, in which a scoliosis brace automatically tightens itself if it has loosened. The OERG focuses on understanding how to treat and assess scoliosis – an abnormal curvature of the spine which can limit range of movement, cause pain and result in an asymmetrical look to the torso. The goal of this system is to facilitate more accurate diagnoses and better treatments, decreasing the need for surgical intervention. I worked on the beginnings of this system under the supervision of Dr. Edmond Lou. Its nice to see that the project was continued well after I completed my student summer internship. I’m sure the code has undergone many revisions since then!

“It’s a failure if a child comes here and ends up having surgery – we don’t consider those successes,” said Jim Raso, who heads up the OERG and is associate director of the Glenrose Rehabilitation hospital… “Children with scoliosis may have to wear a brace for 23 hours a day,” said Lou. The hard shell holds the curve of the spine in place, forcing it into proper alignment, but its effectiveness can be compromised by daily activities, which can cause the brace to loosen. “One of my systems is able to maintain the interface pressure between brace and body. So if the system senses it’s too loose, it will pump air into the force pad area and when it’s too tight, it will release the air,” said Lou. The group is also developing computer software to accurately measure the physical surface of the back. “Surface typography produces a map of the back and shows where the bumps and valleys are,” said Raso. The technology allows clinicians to track physical changes associated with scoliosis and determine if there have been changes to the spinal curve. This offers some information that an X-ray can’t provide. While X-rays are low-dose, radiation exposure is still a health concern for clinicians and patients.

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Yes yes I’m slow I know, but I’ve finally got my blog tagged on technorati.com! Yay!

This website uses a platform called FinalFabric, from BlueShift Innovations Inc., and I wrote my own blogging tool to hook into the system. Rather than using those excellent pre-made solutions (like Wordpress and others), I wrote my own because I really wanted to learn how blogs and tagging really worked.

I’ve had the tagging code posted for a few weeks now, but I messed up in placing the tags ( < a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/blah” > blah < /a > ) outside of the < div > < /div > that contains my blog story. Hence, technorati’s indexing systems were probably thinking “the guy who built this website is a dork, so lets ignore him and not tag it….”. As a result, my blogs weren’t getting tagged. I took a closer look at how other website’s were placing their tags, specifically Mack Male’s website Thanks Mack!

Anyways, now that my blog is tagged I hope to see more traffic on this website!

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Now that I’m a working man and the old days of university are over (at least for now), I wanted to document some of my most interesting projects on my website. I’m doing this for several reasons:

1. I don’t ever want to forget about what the ambitious projects I undertook.
2. I want people in the real world to see me for more than a typical software developer and entreprenuer.
3. For people who casually surf over to this website to feel free to contact me and share their thoughts.

I haven’t gotten around to posting all the interesting projects I’ve worked on, but there are a few up already. You can navigate to the projects list using the “Projects” menu item on my website.

If you wish to e-mail me your comments, I’d be very interested to receive them. Please send questions and comments to patel.ashish@gmail.com (patel dot ashish at gmail dot com)

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Wanna win an XBOX 360? For those of you at the University of Alberta, my sister’s denistry class is having a silent auction for their graduation. They got a smack load of really good things you can bid on, such as iPods, Gift Certificates, and even a date with a guy in their class! They are going to raffle off an XBOX 360 at the auction, which will be held at Boston Pizza on Whyte (in Edmonton).

My sister organized the event, which has a grande finale on November 18th. She asked me long ago to donate something, but I’m just a poor boy. So I decided to donate a website so they can do all their bidding online. If you want to bid you need a username and password, so if you want to participate e-mail me at patel.ashish@gmail.com.

The cool thing about the site is that it yet again uses the FinalFabric Framework that I’ve been using for a lot of sites. It only took me a weekend to setup and site (this includes settin gup the site, writing the code to do auctioning, and the management tools for my sister to control her content).

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Its been a long journey, but its finally done. I’ve been volunteering my time helping the Kids with Cancer Society get a new website up and running. They really wanted a site where they can manage their own content, but they didn’t want anything “over-engineered” or “bloated” with features they didn’t need.

When this project began they choose to use a system called the FinalFabric Framework. The same system that powers my website! I was quite happy about their decision. This gave them the flexibility of putting their content up in a jiffy, using its simple workflow. When I showed them a demo of my website they were quite amazed at how easy it was to use the system. They were using Mambo CMS before they made the switch over. This software package is developed and maintained by a company called BlueShift Innovations, which is a company I founded back in 2003 – which became a stepping stone for my moving on to “bluer” pastures I may be bias in saying I like the system since I helped create it years ago, but if others say its good that’s not so biased now!

Anywho, I’d like to thank Jamie over at RedShark Marketing and Jason over at BlueShift Innovations for volunteering with me to get this site up and running.

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This past month has been busy working to finish off a long time project, known as the FinalFabric Framework. FinalFabric is a web-based application and service development framework that was built using open-source tooling, such as PHP and PostgreSQL. The framework’s plug-in architecture makes it very simple to throw support for other open-source technologies into the system as you need it, or even writing custom modules to extend the system.

I’ve been writing the engine for the framework for the past few years now, since March 2003, in my spare time. Over this time I decided to implement a real solution to show to true value of FinalFabric. So just like everyone else in the world we created a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS is a collection of specialized plug-ins written to do CMS-related functions. I primarily wanted this to ease my work of making websites and it has paid off. In a week I can throw up 10-20 websites easily, before that would take me atleast a month or two to do.

This website, pateltech.com, uses the lastest version of FinalFabric and the set of plug-ins that form the CMS. The company that helped push for this framework and contributed a lot of resources, BlueShift Innovations, is now using this framework too. You can view it on their website http://www.blueshiftsoftware.com.

We’re already getting several other people to run the system, and so far the feedback is great. You can tell which sites use the system by looking for the “powered by FinalFabric” logo.

If you would like to learn more about the system please email me at ashishp@blue-shift.ca

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The ever so anticipated interview between Team Podbot and MAKE magazine was released today. Its great to see the publicity that the robot got in the past few days, and hey my name was on this article!

Mack D. Male and Dickson Wong – are the two guys that brought the robot to Gnomedex. Andrew Ng and Ashish Patel – the two guys that worked with them on the project in Edmonton, AB, Canada.

This article has some good pictures of the Podbot, even under the hatch. You can see the part of the robot I worked on. Here is a quick synopsis of how it works from a technical stand point:

The on-board tablet pc is a Toshiba Portege M200, and the controller tablet we’re using is a Compaq TC1000. The Podbot has a USB hub inside that connects the webcam, ground effects (neon lights) and the serial connector (that connects to the circuit board for controlling the motors). The two back wheels have a servo motor for each, and are powered by a 6V lead-acid battery. The circuit board is powered by a 5V battery and was built from scratch. The Podbot is controlled over wifi, and the communication protocol we’re using is SOAP messaging implemented by Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements 2.0. Everything is written in C# and .NET.

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You may have heard of some buzz words lately: “Blogging” and “Podcasting”. Although they are simple concepts they can be very addictive

Anyways, my good friends Mack Male and Dickson Wong are going to Gnomedex 5.0 in Seattle this week. The have been working with Podcasting for a while at www.blogosphereradio.com. A few months ago they came up with an idea to make podcasting more mobile! In doing so, they wanted to create a robot to display at the Gnomedex 5.0 conference to help in podcasting and promote some of their software tools.

I worked on the robot with the two of them and Andrew Ng. I build the embedded system, Andrew did the mechanical work, and Mack and Dickson worked on the tablet to tablet software and podcasting tools. Below are some pictures of the robot..yes i’m leaking them! haha No one but the four of us and Tod Maffin (CBC Radio) has seen it. There is a big buzz going on right now on many blogs of people anticipating the release of the robot at the conference…some excited…some skeptical.

The robot in my words is HOT! It handles like an RC car but has the capabilities to podcast over a wireless network! (I’m such a geek). Its got ground effects and metallic trims (…it looks like we took it to China town and supped it up)!

The Podbot has been getting quite a bit of publicity lately at Gnomedex 5.0. Check out the related links below for articles.

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