Project Ideas

Doing is the best way to learn, and since learning is what we're here for, let's do some stuff. I've had a number of different ideas for projects recently and not so recently, so to offer you some inspirations and perhaps for me to see if any of these still make sense when you see them typed out, I've compiled a little list of them. (Some of these are actually projects I've already started working on)

• "Multiplayer" Paint. Basically, this would be like a chat program that lets two (or more?) people draw on the same canvas as one would in mspaint. I would implement this in C++, just because I want to learn more about it (and graphics / network programming) but also because most people don't have Python interpreters with pygame on their machine. It might be time for something different :)
• Javascript multiplayer Paint! Use a JS canvas for client side, and save the changes to canvas stored server side (maybe use php, or node.js for serverside scripting?) Then, everyone who visits the page can draw on it for everyone else to see. Obvious downsides of this however are the fact that this is still the internet, and I suspect sooner or later (sooner) it will meet a similar fate tot that of Chatroulette
  
• A 3-4 DoF Robotic arm. It doesn't have to be a very good one either, just to keep costs down. Forward and inverse kinematics are pretty interesting, and this would be a good way to learn and practice both. Servos can be picked up pretty cheaply as well, and the whole thing could be run from an Arduino - the only real difficulty in this would be the mechanical parts, I have no good way of making them properly. I got this idea from...
  
• .. building a hexapod. 3DoF would be minimum for each leg to be able tog et decently smooth motion, the problem is that this would be a rather costly product (for me, at least)
• A simple webcrawler. I don't know what you would use it for, but my ideas were perhaps a Reddit bot (find/keep track of reposts, produce statistics based on comments, find most used pun of the day, etc.), or a Wikipedia crawler (create a graph of pagelinks, those are always neat)
• On a similar note, implementing a graphing layout algorithm - finding a good layout for graphs (graph meaning a set of nodes connected by edges) automatically. There are different ways to implement this, the spring model seems like the simplest: each edge is like a spring that pulls two connected nodes together, or pushes them apart based on their distance from each other. One could also base the pushing/pulling force on the "weight" of each node (weight could be number of incoming edges, for example)
• implement quantitative stock trading algorithms. This is something I personally find really interesting, though I haven't worked on it much. Wikipedia has a nice page about the different algorithms that are used today. A technical problem that needs to be solved first is getting a decent sample of historical data for a given stock, as this is very often necessary for such algorithms.

Of course these all aren't new ideas, but I've found that I usually have good ideas while working on something else, and these are just inspirations for you anyway. Potentially all of these are good for learning something new!