Alvan Caleb Arulandu — Projects

I took a few piano lessons in elementary school, but I’ve always wanted to learn to play the guitar. So, when my plane landed home after freshman fall, I decided it was time, bought a guitar, googled some chords, and built some calluses. I found myself using Yousician‘s smart scroll feature a lot, so I decided to read some signal processing and chord detection literature.

chordy is a CLI tool and desktop application for all platforms optimized for performance in C++. Chords are detected via pitch chroma, chord templating, and a custom adaptive thresholding technique. chordy uses PortAudio to stream input buffers into a lock-free SPSC queue, KissFFT for a multi-threaded fast-fourier transform implementation, and ImGui with OpenGL3 and GLFW3 for display. A legacy version of chordy using Viterbi’s algorithm was written in Python.

Links: GitHub

Have you ever needed a fast verse lookup when you just don’t remember the reference? bible.arulandu.com is a ~8-18ms client-side, fuzzy search for the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, powered by uFuzzy.

bible scrapes the NRSVCE from BibleGateway using multi-threaded Python and a Ruby snippet from jgclark. During development, I found a bug in biblegateway.com. For any single chapter book (Obadiah, Philemon, 2/3 John, Jude), searches of the form {Book} {x}:{y} redirect to {Book} 1:{x} instead of Not Found.

Links: GitHub, Website

Everyone hates waiting for parking, so for HackTJ 8.0, Jason Klein (hardware), Cyril Sharma (frontend), and I (backend) built parkalot to detect occupied parking slots and help customers navigate to them optimally. Very work in progress, but won Best Vehicle Optimization Hack.

Links: GitHub, Demo, DevPost

Omegle failed because of privacy. socap.live is a minimal video chat service, built on Agora, for universities that incentivizes safe, spontaneous interaction by authenticating with college emails and running at fixed times every day.

Built in 24hrs, the first socap.live event at 10 AM streamed ~600m of video with 40+ users and avg. call length of 5m. I personally met a super cool biomath grad student that morning! Won a prize at HackDartmouth IX with Jonah Bard (frontend) and Edward Zhang (strategy).

Links: GitHub, Demo, DevPost

My sister’s a wordle addict, so I made a configurable wordle clone with support for themes and arbitrary board sizes and guess limits. Think octordle, sedecordle, etc. condensed into one UI with daily puzzles and an infinite archive.

Links: GitHub, Website

My sister’s a wordle addict, so I made a configurable wordle clone with support for themes and arbitrary board sizes and guess limits. Think octordle, sedecordle, etc. condensed into one UI with daily puzzles and an infinite archive.

Links: GitHub, Website

While on vacation in India, a family friend reached out about an employee theft problem in his motorcycle showroom. I spent a week without AC building showroom, purchasing a printer, configuring the store network, and onboarding employees. showroom is now used day-to-day in production at Joven Motors in TN, India.

showroom is an end-to-end PoS system for purchases and vehicle service. Features include employee and customer tracking, built-in profit and inventory reporting, and fuzzy inventory search with Fuse.js.

Links: GitHub, Website

According to NYT, The National Suicide Hotline drops 1 in 6 of roughly 2 million calls due to egregious wait times of over an hour. The first iteration of vitality won HackTJ 10.0 as a hybrid alternative, an AI call center solution that allows human operators to view chat logs and seamlessly transfer callers from the AI waitroom to human support.

Built in 24hrs with Rushil Umaretiya’s help for hosting and Twilio config, Vitality uses Twilio Programmalbe Voice for SST/TTS and prompt wraps GPT-3.5.

Links: GitHub, Demo, DevPost

One of my first playable game jam games. A sliding block puzzle where blocks of a color slide together. Targeted for HTML5 and mobile.

Links: Website

One of YGDA‘s first games, Bussin’ features an enthusiastic bus driver, racing around a low-poly town picking up and dropping off kids as fast as possible. I led a team of four, primarily working on procedural world generation with wave function collapse. All music, sprites, and code were produced in-house.

Links: GitHub, Website

I grew up in the competitive math community, so in high school, as statistician of VMT I began an effort to alleviate logistical stress from in-person attendance, grading, ranking, and announcements. During my co-captainship in 2022, VMT fully moved all operations online. Some of my proudest features include internal Discord integration and a LaTeX editor and submission platform for problem of the days. Having graduated, I now maintain the respository, reviewing PRs from current officers.

tjvmt.com is built with Next.js, MongoDB on Atlas, and Vercel Edge functions. At 213K+ views and 13K+ users, deploy costs remain zero.

Links: GitHub

A better solution for collaborative, online courses via GitHub with support for quizzes, LaTeX, markdown, and more! Won HackTJ 9.0 with Michael Fatemi, Cyril Sharma, and Tarushii Goel. Ate a lot of chocolate muffins and played way too much ping pong.

Links: GitHub, Demo, DevPost

This project and video is a fun explainer on Perlin noise, vertex buffers in OpenGL, and react-three-fiber to create a cute website background animation. ~12K views on YouTube.

Links: GitHub, YouTube

A real-time simulation of fixed-wing aerodynamics in Unity Game Engine. Inspired by Waqas Khan’s Ph.D. thesis. Launching a multiplayer dogfight game has been on my bucket list 🚀

Links: GitHub, Website

After struggling to use WebGL with React and no video tutorials to help, I built a fun animation using react-three-fiber and posted my first video tutorial. At the time, react-three-fiber had much less support and my video was one of the first guides out there, now with ~60K views on YouTube.

Links: GitHub, YouTube