Estimating Pi

Who isn' a fan of the Monte Carlo method? In this project I use it to estimate pi

Tax Analysis

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."- Benjamin Franklin. In this project I try to make taxation a bit easier to digest and hopefully give some insights into your tax related decision making

Raspberry Pi Camera

Coming Soon

Smart Power Strip (part 3)

The last step of this project was to put together all the hardware components and design an enclosure for it. You can see a demo of this project in this page.

PCB and Web Services (part 2)

This section described the design and manufacture of the electronics for the smart power strip. This includes the zero cross detection circuit, 3 channel optically isolated triac circuit, and the AC/DC SMPS. Code includes Alexa skill, Lambda function, and DynamoDB setup.

Real time + Wifi on a ESP8266 (part 1)

Not many microcontrollers can handle WiFi while also performing real time control. In this first part of a 3-part project I explain how to use an ESP8266 chip to handle code at a >15Khz rate for an AC dimmer project.

Monte Carlo + Roulette + Mathematica

Spoiler alert: you can't beat roulette- but you should've already known that. In this project, I look at different roulette betting strategies using Wolfram's Mathematica software and the Monte Carlo method.

Roomba WiFi control

Controlling the roomba via a radio receiver and transmitter left alot to be desired. In this project I swap out the receiver with a WiFi chip and test integration with other IoT friendly services.

Roomba RF Mind Control

This project uses an RF transmitter to remotely control a Roomba. Luckily, iRobot provides ample documentation for communicating with their robots so I was able to make a passive device that plugs into it's serial port.

Amazon Echo & Particle Photon

Connect your Amazon Echo device with a Particle device and control your devices with your voice.

Magic Mirror

This project uses a Raspberry Pi to control a monitor that sits behind a double sided mirror. The pi points to a web page that allowed me to add some widgets to the reflection.

IoT Power Meter

This project combines a digital power meter with the popular ESP8266 module to transmit the meter's data over WiFi. A web page then displays the meter's results and adjusts information according to the received data.

Dimmable Web-Controlled Outlet

Continuation of the dimmable AC light project. This time I put it into a nice project box and connected the Triacs to some outlets. This way I can experiment pluggging different devices in and see how they react to a chopped AC wave.

Motion-Activated Traffic Light

Quick weekend project I made as an excuse to keep some hardware. Basically a PIR sensor acts as a timer trigger and tells to arduino to turn the relays on/off in a particular sequence.

Dishwasher Hack

The goal of this project was to have a dishwasher automatically restart the washing sequence and perform as many washes as requested. This involved modifying a control panel from another unit that multiplexed two 8-segment displays, 7 buttons and 8 LEDs.

Autotransformer to Voltage Stabilizer

This autotransformer was originally operated by a pair of switches; one to go up the windings, another one to go down. The goal of this project was to make it self-regulate. In other words, to have a set point for the voltage and have the transformer actuate itself into the correct voltage.

Automatic Wheel Tester and DAQ

Automatic wheel tester for iRobot left and right wheels. Embedded testing criteria and motor control. Uses I²C protocol to control 4 H-bridges, records RPM and current to SQL server database.

Web AC Dimmer

Improvement on embedded web server project. This time using an ENC28J60 module, opto-isolated TRIACs, and a zero-cross detector to allow for AC dimming over the internet.

Embedded Web Server

The goal of this project was to be able to control lamp lights remotely. I used a relay module and an Arduino UNO for the first iteration of this project as well as a secondary server to better style the user interface.

Automatic Battery DAQ

This project was made to test 3 battery parameters and save the results to a database. Designed for operator ease of use and quick testing; the operator has to scan the serial number (system verifies PDC), place battery on fixture and react based on the output from the program.

Decoding Multimeter Serial Port Data

Radioshack's 2200039 Digital Multimeter with PC interface is a great deal! For less than $10 you get a 46-range multimeter with a usb PC interface. Radioshack's software does well at reading the data but there's some extra tinkering if you want to make your own custom application for it - they don't provide any protocol documentation for it.

Gas Consumption Calculator

After the purchase of a car I decided I wanted to calculate some basic information like average mpg, monthly fuel consumption, miles traveled, etc. I saw there were a few apps out there that did it but none were free or offered exactly what I wanted. The solution? - making my own. Very simple, straight-forward project..

Galilean Thermometer Displacement Calculator

Graduate year project for Conduction and Radiation Heat Transfer class. It's a MATLAB application with GUI that calculates the displacement of a spherical glass bulb with a given radius in a cylindrical body of water (aka Galilean Thermometer).

Nema Mounting Bracket FEA

Graduate year project for Introduction to Finite Element Methods class where I analyzed realistic stress conditions on a NEMA mounting bracket. The bracket was put under a simulated load of 75 lbs. Material properties and constraints were checked using Autodesk Inventor.