Articles

FIRST Robotics 2025

For the past 10 weeks I have mentored FIRST Robotics Team 6566 “Battering Rams” out of Lamphere High School in Madison Heights, MI. FIRST is an after school program that uses robots to teach STEM topics to high school students, and prepare them for work in a team based environment. Engineering concepts like gear ratios, power/energy/velocity/acceleration relationships, torque, Object Oriented Programming, systems engineering 3d modeling, and most importantly: Teamwork! Just yesterday the team made it to 2nd place in the district championship held in Belleville, MI.

Ham Radio Repair & Upgrade

This is the humble TM-732A, a Kenwood brand Ham Radio, with both UHF and VHF capabilities. Originally, it came with orange incandescent bulbs. These bulbs were attached to a dimmer circuit that used a transistor. It used 4 lights in 2 pairs, each pair with a 10 Ohm resistor in series. Bulbs Dimmer I chose to replace these bulbs, as they had burnt out, with sick red LEDs, to give the radio a more cyberpunk / professional appearance.

Most of the cool stuff I've Done

So in no particular order, here are some of the things that I’ve done that I think are worth mentioning. Ran a First Robotics Team and got to the World Championships One of my most proud accomplishments is getting to the world championships, and I can’t thank the wonderful mentors that joined me enough! Every success and failure was shared and being here at this time and place has truly been a blessing.

Landing Prediction App

This app is designed to solve a particular problem I have discovered in my amateur rocketry setup: The code I use to decode telemetry from my rocket data only runs on a laptop, as its writtin in MATLAB. While I’m out in the desert I want to be carrying as little weight as possible, a 200g phone is much easier than a multiple kg laptop. This code also benefits from sensors in the phone, namely positioning and altitude.

First Robotics 2023

For the last two years, I have been a mentor for First Robotics Team 5901. This year, we advanced far enough to get to the Michigan State Championship as well as the World Championship in Houston, TX. We had a hectic time organizing it last minute but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything. My team performed at their peak, placing well above expectations and predictions. Watching my students put all of their mechanical work, practice, and skill into every match was great to see.

Looking Glass Tips

Looking glass can be really difficult to setup correctly, so heres some tips IVSHEM Device Make sure to disable secure boot in the VM’s BIOS/UEFI. You can enter the bios by using Windows 10’s secure boot options entry in the start menu, then navigating thru that until you find the UEFI settings Scream This one should work out of the box, once you figure out where to download it and how to install it.

Kicad PCB Design

My Apartment does not have in-unit laundry. So, when the laundry is done, I do not hear the laundry machine stop, and would often set timers to avoid my clothes becoming wrinkly. This doesn’t solve my issue though, sometimes the laundry machine takes less time than you expect due to the automatic cycle, which I prefer to use. This PCB is intended to fix that. it consists of: An ESP8266 NodeMCU An MPU6050 Accelerometer connected via SPI This circuit board A strong magnet so I can easily attach and detach my gadget Two AA batteries, for cost effectiveness.

Ham Radio

I found this nifty little code that shows you current local space weather.

High Power Rocketry

Back in college one of my extracurriculars was rocketry. You’d buy a kit, put it all together, drive out to the desert, launch it, and finally: recover it. For me, that last part was the toughest. Here’s an image of the area that I launched rockets in: The geography was very homogenous, landmarks spaced far apart, easy to get lost in. My rocket didn’t have any tracking equipment besides the two eyes in my head and that wasn’t enough.

Drone Mapping Project

This RC plane is designed to fly over an area with a gopro or similar camera and map areas. Its part of my strategy to not lose rockets I have launched in the desert. It will have a wingspan of about 4 ft 11 in. I’m trying to make as much of it 3d printed as possible, so that I can have fun designing it as a side project, and so that I can share it with the world when its done.

Website creation

I created this website to hold onto important things I’ve found on the internet, and to more generally carve out my own little spot. I hope you like it! On the bottom left are contact pages so you can get a hold of me if need be. This website uses Hugo to generate the HTML because I dont want to do it myself, and it uses a theme called “Digital Garden” to make it look nice, expecially for phones.

Ghost Image Display

This display uses a string of LEDs (WS2812b, if you want to buy some on amazon), connected to an arduino and SD card. The arduino reads images from the SD card, and displays them one column at a time to make this ghostly display. Any image sized corectly will do! Here is a couple more pictures of this display! and here is another one, with (in)famous frog, Pepe.

Inav Telemetry Fix

I’ve Been running Matek boards on my quadcopter for quite some time due to their nice build quality and associated PDB. However I was never able to get their telemetry working via softserial. I recently got the Matek F411 Wing board for a drone project and attempted to get this fixed. After hours and hours of banging my head against the wall and trying to get my boards to output that sweet sweet data, I found the one thing I needed to do all along: Screw around with half duplex.

using new disks for LVM tutorial

use lsblk to identify disks to use. on a blank disk, use sudo pvcreate /dev/<diskdevicename> If you get this error: Cannot use /dev/<diskdevicename>: device is partitioned Use this line to completeley wipe the disk: sudo wipefs --all --backup /dev/<diskdevicename> use sudo pvs to see your volume groups and disks associated with them. use sudo vgextend /dev/<volumegroupname>/<logicalvolumename> /dev/<diskdevicename> to add your new disk to your existing volume group. I ticked the box during OS installation to use LVM, so I already have a volume group.

Ham Radio Repair & Upgrade

January 30, 2025

This is the humble TM-732A, a Kenwood brand Ham Radio, with both UHF and VHF capabilities. board overview

Originally, it came with orange incandescent bulbs. These bulbs were attached to a dimmer circuit that used a transistor. It used 4 lights in 2 pairs, each pair with a 10 Ohm resistor in series.

Bulbs

bulb schematic

Dimmer

dimmer_schematic

I chose to replace these bulbs, as they had burnt out, with sick red LEDs, to give the radio a more cyberpunk / professional appearance.

bulb comparison I used some simple ohms law calculations that I was taught in college and utilized the following equation to size the current limiting resistors that i would replace the 10 Ohms with:

voltage drop current resistance math

Then I simply got two 1/8th watt resistors who amount added up to very close to 530, soldered them in series, then replaced the 10 ohms and bulbs as so:

board overview

Then I was able to put it all together again and show this nice video:

Capacitors

I also attempted to fix an issue with the radio not turning on. It appeared to be a voltage regulator issue. I replaced the delay capacitor on the L78LR05 that was on the display board, and that seemed to fix it. Although I ran it without such a capacitor and with the reset pin of said regulator cliped for a while, I do not recommend it.

voltage_regulator image I also replaced a larger electrolytic capacitor on the board with a new one of the same capacity.

For this project I also had to track down the manuals, so for the TM-732A, here is the Owner's manual and the Service Manual.

If you wish to try your hand at fixing up a radio such as this, I highly recommend printing out relevant pages of the service manual and annotating them so you can begin to understand the circuit diagram, it became much easier for me once I did that.