My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers.

Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes!

The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous surface in a short time compared to static systems or man-portable insecticide spraying. Our goal is to be competitive with ITNs against Malaria.

Some links :

https://hackaday.com/2025/03/25/supercon-2024-killing-mosqui...

https://manifund.org/projects/build-anti-mosqu

Working on fabric construction blocks (like Lego of clothing), that you can use to build clothing and accessories completely by hand without any tools or machines.

Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eKc6c5tDw

Optimizing the Marginalia Search index code. The new code is at least twice as fast in benchmarks, but I can't run it in production because it turns out when you do it's four times as slow as what came before it for the queries that are the simplest and fastest to the point where queries exceed their timeout values by a lot.

I'm 97% certain this is because the faster code leads to more page thrashing in the mmap-based index readers. I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.

[1] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf