During my first year with my university’s rocketry team, I worked on a small group of 10 building Ariel - a two-stage actively controlled high-power rocket. It was a two-stage rocket designed to reach an apogee of 2km and housed numerous components, including a cold gas thruster roll control system, electronically controlled avionics & recovery systems, and a data collection payload. I was heavily involved in the design process from start to finish, and mainly specialized in CAD design & manufacturing.
Near the end of Ariel’s design, I was also tasked with the development of a cansat-style payload to demonstrate the rocket’s validity as a vessel for scientific research and data collection. We settled on an environmental surveying device which would measure average UV light levels at different points in our lower atmosphere. I personally designed the 3D-printed structure which housed the electronics and secured everything into the rocket’s nose cone, and also aided the development of the measurement electronics.
As a second year engineering project, I have been working on designing and building a gearbox to properly step down a high-speed low-torque motor to power a high-torque low-speed output. The gearbox models the needs found in a modern electric bike, and the system therefore must be mountable to a bike frame and handle the relevant forces. We are also working with the given material and cost constraints to deliver a realistic end product.
As a personal project, I built a prototype device to remotely and wirelessly control professional DSLR and mirrorless. The hardware is based on a low-cost ESP32 microcontroller running a custom C++ backend. A cross-platform flutter-based app is then used on the client device to connect to and control the camera over BLE or WiFi. Current features include remote triggering, timed capture, intervalometer emulation, and control over autofocus modes. In the future, I plan to add multi-device linking, integration with a vast array of sensors, and a 3D printed housing to encase the device.
While a part of my school's Technology Student Association Team, I built a delivery drone capable of picking up objects and dropping them at a designated drop location. Prototypes were tested, and eventually a servo-controlled claw was attached to the bottom of the drone's body. Everything was controlled via a standard RC transmitter, and the drone was capable of stable flight - even employing sensor-based altitude hold for easier flying.