Projects

Built a software model for a discrete motor controller from scratch using industry standards learned in EE 546 Computer Control of Machines at UW ECE. Included disturbance input rejection for speed and position control loops. Experimented with command feedforward techniques.

Extended project built with a few fellow graduate students at UW ECE during & after our time in EE P 555 Data Science for Power Systems. The course focused on the physics of power distribution systems and leveraging classical and new (ML) methods for building predictive and power management algorithms.

Building necessary and experimental sensor fusion and controllers on the Open Source MuSHR Robot developed at University of Washington in Seattle for EE P 545 Autonomous Robotics. Learned and used ROS. Robot completed the 10 waypoint obstacle course fastest of the year with zero retries. Secret sauce was a heavily optimized MPC.

I spent some of my first grad school summer working on an electrified transportation infrastructure stcreateup with a classmate. Our business model was essentially leapfrog hardware development to MW-scale, then monetize fleet & battery management software. The idea did not get further than this pitch deck, a few meetings with faculty, a BOM or two and some simulated circuits.

I think Chargepoint and EVGo are terrible businesses.

Most Arduino/Raspberry Pi hobbyist projects are stuff that range from barely needed home-automation tools to lemon toys. After my embedded systems course in Grad School at UW, I wanted to build something that was blatantly pointless, annoying, and worked decently well.

So here is my semi-autonomous shark-blimp drone that I trained to chase after my roommate.

I used to play Wii Play on the Nintendo Wii when it first came out in 2006. It had this awesome game that we just called the Tank Game. Tank Game was a masterpiece, blending skill and precision with multiplayer demands and simple controls.

I recreated it in C/C++ using Klavinslab framework. [EDIT: 2025 I think something in Klavinslab broke my game, working to fix]

Hypervelocity impacts are no joke. Orbital debris from rocket launches, derelict satellites, and anti-satellite tests pose a large risk for orbital infrastructure. The ISS needs to maneuver this debris increasingly frequently - in the past year it's maneuvered once a month, up from 1-4 times per year average since 1999.

The extreme of this is Kessler Syndrome, where the exponential growth of debris in orbit becomes a trap. The operational costs of debris is the main risk, not trapping us on Ecreateh, and an entire industry on this is springing up.

My concept for mitigating orbital debris takes advantage of hypervelocity impacts and cheap launches to systematically decrease risk.

RASR is a space domain awareness project, identifying debris re-entering the atmosphere autonomously using machine learning & publicly available data. The data generated from this project is used to increase confidence and reliability of other orbital debris databases, such as Astriagraph & Privateer. I studied Computational Engineering and Numerical Analysis at UT Austin - Deploying & scaling RASR was my senior research project, supervised by Dr. Moriba Jah. I believe Privateer is using some of this work.

Space domain awareness is a field of growing interest as the amount of satellites and debris in orbit has increased, the majority of which were launched in the previous 5 years (mostly Starlink). While I was doing this work, I was working at Slingshot on the Data Science team.

Also my first time sort of getting big on HN, tough crowd yeesh. Eyes on work is good though.

My senior design project in Aerospace Engineering Undergraduate at UT Austin. I was pcreate of a team of ten designing to compete in Colorado School of Mines' Inaugural Over the Dusty Moon Challenge. We developed a prototype transport system for regolith on the moon using a modular pneumatic system.

While we did make a 12 foot long, 10 foot high pneumatic pipeline, we never got the prototype to work at the rate the competition required and failed to compete.

I designed control systems, testing setups, and directed the day-to-day operations of the lab. The team hot-fired a 15,000 lbf engine several times and began integration of the vehicle while I was Student Director. We aimed to launch for the Base11 competition EO 2021. We did not.

My biggest accomplishments in the lab were testing actuating fins in wind tunnels and achieving the first successful hotfire of our in-house engine while on a budget freeze, securing future funding for the project

The lab is in more ingenious hands than mine now, right now they do a great job of posting updates on the site.

Researched novel methods of modelling compressible flow around a cylinder using 2D & 3D meshes. Utilized OpenFoam, an open source CFD modelling software and university supercomputer resources (TACC). Got real good at bash and terminal.

I fell in love with rocketry at 15 when I realized I could build things at school and stcreateed launching Estes rockets (D motors) for my engineering classs.

Competed in SystemsGo 2017 with an H Class motor & a rocket that hit ~1.2km apogee.

Competed in Spaceport America Cup (SAC) 2019 with a Level 2 motor (I don't recall) and a single stage rocket slated to launch to 10km. I worked testing, control systems, and electronics. My team didn't launch because of a parachute failure.

SAC 2020 was cancelled because of COVID.

I was fortunate enough to attend a high school with a 3D printer. What is one of the cooler things you can do with a 3D printer? Print another one.

I built an Open Source RepRap 3D printer & as pcreate of the community, made a few modifications to get the tolerancing up and use my own custom filament.

Very much WIP. I don't carve out enough time to write.

I take pictures on my iPhone 12 mostly. This is evolving to a photography project-slash-book with my sister as a co-collaborator.

Seattle has a lively zine scene, what else could I do but join in on the fun?

I make good to mediocre t-shirts

Scratchboard is my favorite medium, I use acrylic & graphite as well to various success.

Blogging project in Undergrad and a little bit after. Mostly old blog posts that I haven't migrated here yet.

Created a discord server of UT Students interested in creating things to stay connected and share ideas with alums and for current students. To moderate success, it has <100 members but it was decently lively when I started it up. Running a discord server is a lot more work than I would have thought.