Programming

Razor has been a huge learning experience for me. This was my first real dive into C#, Batch, and project management on a coding level. Razor started out as a collection of Batch files that interlinked, first asking about the computer’s destination after setup, what client , and what credentials you wanted it to have. It stored all this data in a raw text document, and the rest of the Batch files referenced that document and added to it as you followed the setup. This was extremely primitive, but it got the job done. The C# variant is far more refined, but still rough around the edges. This was a complete remake of the original. It keeps every feature, adds buttons instead of keypresses, and a (mostly) polished UI. Unfortunately, it was never finished due to my resources being allocated elsewhere, but Razor remains a very nice first project. Some of the features that Razor has: first, setting up a POS station—asking the user for all the necessary information, providing the username and password from that information, and configuring a workgroup around the location's requirements. Next was a network configurator: simply asking the user for the IP address, gateway, etc., and setting all adapters to this information. After that, it will prompt the user on how much free space the F-drive partition should be (for Focus POS, the software needs an extra drive), giving a slider to easily allocate the space. Finally, for setup, it asks what the computer should be named for the remote management software and installs, registers, and sorts it all out. This saved hours of setup time for every single point-of-sales system unit we installed.

Some other miscellaneous features Razor has is a remake of NetPLWiz. It makes adding users, groups, and setting automatic device sign-in a breeze. Kiosk sign-in that makes a macro run on every startup to punch in the access code for Focus POS to log into a kiosk user. Zip files in F-drive removes all but the most recent archive to cut down on space usage. And finally, Focus message explorer will access the logs of the computer, specifically for Focus. It makes every log human readable and sorts them into critical states, delays, and general work processes. This made troubleshooting way easier.

Helium Arcade Manager is a piece of software I made for a virtual reality arcade called Systems Edge I ran with my buddy Jacob. We had eight different VR setups all linked to Windows machines. The problem with managing all of these is they needed to boot users off after their time expired. So I created the arcade manager. It communicated over the network via TCP to the main computer, which hosted the server. Each machine “checked in” every ten seconds if it didn't have an active connection, and then stayed alive while a connection was there. Then, via the server, you could set times, and the client on the VR machines would start up SteamVR and let the user pick what games to play. After the time was up, it would shut SteamVR down and make the VR go black. There was also an on-screen timer so viewers could let the user know how much time they had left. The software was rather simple, but it was a great time-saving tool, and through the year Systems Edge was open, I steadily improved it.

This was one piece of software that I got to really focus on and polish up. I never distributed it, but it is still in a state where I could put something into it, license it, and really do something with it. Arcade manager was my first dive into computer networking, and it was written 100% from scratch, so I had to struggle to learn TCP and exactly what it means, which in turn further helped me with my knowledge of networking as a whole.