Description I have five different remotes to control the things in my living room. They transmit using infrared (TV+speakers), Bluetooth (Chromecast), and RF on/off keying (OOK) (fan+lights) I misplace at least one of these remotes almost every day. The goal of this project is to unify all of them into one central hub, which can then be controlled by any of several identical simpler remotes scattered throughout the house. The advantages of this type of setup include:

These little nRF24L01+ radios are awesome. They are available very cheap and provide a simple way to add fast packet-based wireless communications to a project. I’ve used them before on my LED strip audio visualizer and LED glasses. Extended range versions of these modules are available on amazon with a built-in LNA (low-noise amplifier) and PA (power amplifier). I’ve always had trouble getting these to work for me though. Looking around online it seems like I’m not the only one.

Description This is an attempt to build a simple confocal microscope based on a laser scanner made for laser light shows. It also integrates widefield imaging and a CMOS camera for easier sample alignment and focusing. A confocal microscope can achieve better detail and narrower depth of field than a conventional microscope by scanning a laser spot across a sample, and having the scattered light from the sample pass through a small pinhole after it is collected by the objective lens.

Description This project is an attempt to recreate the pistol reflex sight from the game Half Life: Alyx. This is an in-game screenshot of the reflex sight: To recreate it, I used the C-RT20 self-developing hologram film sold by LitiHolo. The film requires no chemicals to develop and is easy to use. I started by taking reference screenshots of the pistol in game. From those I made a dimensional drawing of the round disk elements in Solidworks and laser-cut them out of 2.

Description The Valve Index is a virtual reality headset created by Valve. The position of the headset and controllers are tracked using at least two lighthouses. Each lighthouse has two lasers in it, each of which produces a flat beam of infrared light. The beams are perpendicular and offset from each other, and spin at a high speed such that each beam scans across the entire VR space at about 100 times per second.

Description This project started as a last minute birthday present idea for a friend of mine who is also an electrical engineer. The idea started in 2018 when I decided to prank him by waking him up with some high brightness LEDs I had recently bought: The LEDs run at about 18 volts at 3A max so to power them I originally used my benchtop power supply The goal with this project was to do something similar but make it portable.

Description This circuit was a part of my senior design project, an electronic throttle for the OSU formula racing team. As part of the very long list of safety requirements an electronic throttle has to meet in order to participate in formula racing, there has to be a non-programmable safety circuit that is capable of cutting power to the engine if the throttle is open by more than 10% and the driver is braking hard for more than one second.

Description This project is a small form-factor digital multimeter capable of measuring DC voltage (up to +/-60V) and resistance. It is powered by an ADS1115 ADC module and ATMega328P microcontroller. The screen is a Broadcom HCMS-2912 dot matrix display, which has integrated brightness control and refresh circuitry. I built it in Spring 2017. Features The multimeter is capable of measuring DC voltage up to +/- 60 Volts and resistance from 100 ohms to 50 kohms.

Description This project uses an Arduino MEGA 2560 to continuously perform an FFT on an audio signal and display it on an LED strip. It can also adjust the volume of my speakers with a remote control. The remote works reliably up to about 40 feet away (through 1-2 walls). Visualizer The visualizer part of the code uses Tom Roberts’ fixed-point FFT library and displays the result on an Adafruit DotStar LED strip.

Description This project is a digital clock that uses IN-14 nixie tubes to display the time. It is controlled by a raspberry pi using shift registers. I did this project in 2016 but didn’t have any online documentation except for the github repo and a youtube video until now. One of the key features of this project is that since it is powered by a raspberry pi, it can be easily controlled from within python or bash scripts, and is automatically network synchronized as long as the pi has an internet connection.