https://jasonfantl.com/A blog where I write about my computer science projects, usually with some animations, code, and/or simulations. 2026-02-22T19:28:09+00:00 Jason Fantl https://jasonfantl.com/ Jekyll © 2026 Jason Fantl /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-02-12T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-21T19:28:10+00:00 https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Universal-Unique-IDs/ Jason Fantl

We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be unique? Being able to identify objects is a fundamental tool for building ot...

2025-06-27T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-21T19:28:10+00:00 https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Voice-Controlled-Swarms/ Jason Fantl

Inspired by Command School from Enders Game, let’s make swarms that we can control with our voice! We will do this by having a voice-to-text program feed our voice commands into an LLM, and then that LLM can run a bunch of commands to control the swarm. Below is the final result. Your browser does not support the video tag. And we will make this in two parts: First we will creat...

2025-06-10T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-21T19:28:10+00:00 https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Broadcasts-in-Reliable-Ad-hoc-Networks/ Jason Fantl

My personal interest is in swarm robotics, a field requiring the coordination of agents in a decentralized mesh-network. One of the most fundamental operations in such networks is broadcast: getting a message from a single source to every other node in the system The following is a growing collection of broadcast algorithms for different reliable ad-hoc network models. I am slowly trying to ...

2025-03-21T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-22T19:27:33+00:00 https://jasonfantl.com/posts/What-is-Entropy/ Jason Fantl

People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy, so hopefully you find it helpful. My goal is that by the end of this long pos...

2025-02-11T00:00:00+00:00 2026-02-21T19:28:10+00:00 https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Space-of-3D-Rotations/ Jason Fantl

How do we represent a rotation in 3 dimensions? This is a surprisingly deep question, and one we can learn a lot from. Our goal will be to “rediscover” quaternions from first principles, building them up by exploring different representations and fixing the failures along the way. Finding safe representations for 3D rotations has applications in a wide array of areas: 3D modeling software, rob...