The Expressif ESP32 is used to enable peer-to-peer data sharing without internet connectivity, taking place at a physically local level - a "sneakernet" or "meshnet" vision, over WiFi. The aim is for this functionality to dovetail with other tools for both consuming and creating content, to enable a slower, more private, decentralized form of social media - as well as regular file sharing.
Devices hold a unique ID / public key as well as a "membership list" of group IDs. When "beaconing" to other devices to initiate a share, group IDs of the groups the user is a part of are sent as well. Determining the other party's memberships allows each device to know which friend's updates can be passed along second or thirdhand. On device, shared content is stored in a flat manner in the filesystem, with a list of directories for each friend ID.

The device discovers peers by performing an AP scan in station mode. Peers broadcast their public key as the SSID. When a known publickey is found in the scan, the Wi-Fi connection is established, using the shared key as the password. If devices are members of the same group, but haven't yet exchanged keys, the connection is authenticated with the shared secret associated with the group. This also flags the device to only share updates with a permission level of "share to the entire group."

Once the connection has been established, a socket connection is opened between the devices. The "server" / device acting as AP walks its filesystem, each file is stat'd, and the modify time, size and absolute filename are sent. On the client / peer side, when a modify-time and filename tuple is received, the local file of that filename is opened, statted, and mtimes and sizes are compared. This is a more rudimentary and coarse approach than the rsync approach of sending a complete file signature list, with more failure modes - but this is intended to pare down the bandwidth footprint, and require less CPU time opening and streaming files from the not-so-fast eMMC bus. After profiling this file syncing approach, I'll eventually aim for a more exact "first pass" diff.

If the remote file is newer, the local device pushes the filename to a "generate and send file signature hash" stack. If the local file is newer, the local device pushes the filename to a "request file signature" stack. The list of requested signature filenames are sent to the server device. The server generates and sends the requested signatures, while the client sends its own signatures. The rdiff library is used to generate deltas from the corresponding local signatures, which are fwritten directly across the socket. Deltas are applied to the local files, and the sync process is complete.

Expressif has developed a connectionless Wi-Fi protocol called ESP-NOW that facilitates communication with 802.11 action frames alone. I've used this to implement a method for authenticated key agreement when two devices are in physical proximity. On a specific UI interaction, the device will set its SSID to a "magic word" known to all devices, to become "discoverable". This allows the other device to add it as an ESP-NOW peer by its MAC, and send a "hello" packet. This packet contains the publickey and "display name" of the device. Upon reception of this packet, the publickey and name are displayed in the UI, with an "add as friend?" modal. If the device consents to add the peer as a friend, it sends its own public key and name back. Both sides generate shared keys, and the discoverable device sets its SSID back to its public key. A test Wi-Fi connection is established, and if successful, is reflected in the UI.
Using LoRa and WiFi, the ESP32 will silently and passively sync data updates from friends when you pass within reception distance, with these updates passing virally through the friend network. This data sharing is governed by fine-grained privacy rules. The idea is that your Karasu is associated with a certain directory on your computer; on your trusted home network, it passively downloads all the new data put in this folder. When you go out and see friends, based on the privacy rules you've set, Karasu passively syncs some or all of those files and subdirectories on to your friends' Karasu, where it continues to be shared from friend to friend. Due to LoRa's range, this process doesn't have to happen in direct physical proximity as with WiFi, but can rather happen over distances of 500m or more.
My goal with the ESP32 part of Karasu is to enable a form of sharing that feels more valuable for the sharer and recipient, like getting a package in the mail. This platform doesn't enable instant updates, as with the internet, but I believe this is a huge plus. This platform enables a slower, "trickle" form of social network connectivity, where longer-form, higher-value content is shared more infrequently.

STUDIO
Eita
Eita
Eita is a project to implement a rich system for procedural 3D modeling of architecture. Eita is a fork of a project by @Isimic, and leverages Blender's best-in-class mesh representations and operations. Eita is planned to connect to an implementation of a modeling language based on the CGA language described in Pascal-Muller 2004. while most CGA implementations act as "lego sets" applying simple rule-based transformations to existing mesh "modules", the blender API allows me to develop rule-based routines for each constituent part of modern urban buildings.

This image demonstrates dynamically generating extruded molding / fascia profiles as well as paned glass windows.
My goal with Eita is to eventually dynamically generate rich and complex cities, going through a whole "layer cake" of procedural processes, from terrain generation, road network generation using tensor fields, parceling, building generation, and finally modeling the evolution of a city's architecture over time.
The scope of this project is ridiculous and I will probably be working on it for quite a while.
Blender's Python API provides a rich and extensive suite of mesh modeling operations. This allows me to spend less development time implementing mesh modeling operations, and more in understanding and implementing the style rules that lie under the structure of windows, facades, roofs, and other parts of buildings.
One of the fundamental "building blocks" of Eita is the generation of profiles for extrusion. Much of the geometry is formed by parametrically defining profiles to be extruded along a given curve (or edge - vertex list, rather.)
When procedurally generating complex forms, a key quality is the "order of operations". In my opinion, approaches that attempt to be order-independent are necessarily hamstrung, because the nature of the structure naturally follows an ordered series of steps, from coarse to fine complexity. Moreover, the dimension dependencies, while they are interrelated, are strictly hierarchical. By decomposing the building's structure into "blueprints" for each module, it allows me to understand the dependency graph of dimensional relationships much more clearly.
The purpose of breaking down a building into constituent components and developing a schema and "blueprint" for modeling it in a sequence of steps, is to be able to abstract buildings into "style families" of "style classes" with "style rules" that vary. For instance, a style classmay have windows of 3 styles - dependent on the style class, they may have a variety of dimensions and panes, etc. Many buildings fall into a small number of similar style families. By developing rich modular building blocks dependent on a hierarchy of style rules, we can procedurally generate a vast variety of buildings that still obey real-life dimensional relationships and style rules.
After I reach a good set of modular primitives, the next step will be to write a simple declarative language for describing style rules. I plan to use the PyParsing parser combinator.


STUDIO
Other Projects

Tetrakarn
Tetrakarn is a collection of a few different implementations of pitch classification for musical analysis, as well as chord detection and key detection, in Javascript.
Table Talk
Table Talk was a project I worked on in college to create a web platform for collaborative discussion around texts. The idea was to create a commentary platform for source texts, such as journal articles, literature, or other written works. Rather than commenting on the text as a whole, commenters would highlight a section of the text to leave a comment about the particular part, which would spawn a discussion thread around that highlighted section. Features that were planned were to allow "connections", where a commenter could highlight multiple sections to leave a comment on the parts taken together; support for rich comments that could include markup, LaTeX, images, and other hypertext; as well as support for importing a rich variety of document formats.
Myrrh
Myrrh is a slow-simmering long-term project to build a high-performance 3D game engine in C++. Myrrh aims to strike a balance between complexity and capability, choosing powerful and robust strategies for animation, rendering, and audio.