Projects

During the summer of 2022, I became involved in a student organization called Bronco Space where I have worked volunteer hours in a team effort to build space systems. The first project I got involved with was a 1U cube satellite named Yearling, where I became the Lead Software Engineer for the project. 

Following the failed deployment of Pleaides Yearling, my team produced a rapid iteration on the original Yearling. With lessons learned from integrating and operating the previous satellite, we developed a solution that became the baseline for what would later be released as the PROVES educational CubeSat kit. Upon successful deployment of the satellite, acquisition of signal was achieved. The satellite continued to beacon for about 50 minutes before unexpectedly never being received from again.

Following the success of Yearling-2, the team made a few minor tweaks to the overall design. The launch opportunity came unexpectedly and the team integrated and qualified the satellite for space in under a week. The tweaks made to the satellite resulted in the life of the satellite increasing by about 10 times. Further radiation testing following the final message received from the satellite shows a change in software and tweaks to board placement may enable the satellite to last significantly longer.

This project was designed with the intent to intelligently monitor plant conditions such as soil moisture, ambient temperature, humidity, and Light intensity. In addition to monitoring, the Smart Garden also waters the plant if in direct contact with a source for the device to pump to the plant. Two versions were developed: the original version (1.0) could only monitor and water the plant while displaying some data on an LCD, version 2.0 added internet capabilities with cloud based notifications, a micro SD card for data collection, and a higher resolution LCD for displaying real time data.

I completed this project when I was a High School Senior. The deliverable for this physics project was to build a circuit. This could be a light bulb and a battery. However, I thought that was too boring, so I built a bluetooth remote controlled car, with ultrasonic distance sensors, to detect whether or not my car was about to crash into a wall. I was a bit of a nerd, but it was so exciting at the time! This was my first project that I built that involved a microcontroller (Arduino). 

This was my first project in college, and it was by far the most fun and goofy thing I have ever built! I had a partner for this project, and we had a blast connecting bananas to resistors and to an Arduino. Basically, this project needed to detect that the user had walked up to the device, and the bananas acted as piano keys, where when you touch one of the bananas the Arduino would send a signal to a speaker to play whichever note you pressed. OH, and the project had a little carboard hand cutout that would wave at you (with a servo) when you walked up to the device!

My class had partnered with the rocket club at Mt. SAC, and my professor assigned us each group projects to build a device to stick into the club's rockets that would detect launch, apogee, and landing. Through this, the project also needed to collect data and store it (in an SD card) in real time about the rocket's altitude, pitch, GPS location, etc. There was also a transmitter and receiver, so we could receive the GPS location data to reacquire the capsule. Unfortunately, the launch day got rained out, so we instead simulated the launch with our professor shaking the capsule, putting the capsule in a small vacuum chamber where he could change the pressure, and finally hiding our capsules somewhere on campus for us to find with the GPS module.

This has been a much more recent project that I have been slowly working on. This project is a work in progress, but as of August 2021, I have designed and 3D printed a design of my glasses with hinges, along with a case for travel. Now that I have a basic design of simple glasses, I am aiming to start testing some electronics to stuff into a pair. One day, a pair of these glasses will contain a flashlight, a mini OLED display, speakers for listening to music, and a camera. People always say, I wish I had my camera to take a picture/video of that, my goal is to put that ability on their face, so people can not only live in the moment, but relive it too (from the same exact perspective).

This project has been temporarily suspended until I am able to ensure the device can maintain security, while providing more accessibility to my house. So far, this project has a 3D printed case with the code mostly completed and tested. A demonstration of how the project works can be seen in the link above.