Personal Projects

Firmware lead in the Waterloo Satellite Team

I continue to be the senior lead of the CDH team for UW Orbital, a team based around getting a cubesat to orbit. CDH, or command and data handling, involves almost entirely firmware, and as such my primary role on the team is writing, approving and planning out firmware to run on the satellite. The proposed satellite uses a TMS570LS1224, an Arm R4F based microprocessor, running FreeRTOS.

Taught me about management, processor selection, delegation, and creating a large code base from scratch.

Cell Life simulator

I was interested in Evolutionary Neural Networks, so I decided to make a simulator to allow them to evolve. Based on a simple plant-herbivore-carnivore model, attaching a NN that was grown based on genetic parameters passed from parents to each carnivore allowed them to slowly learn how to properly interact with their environment, though it took considerable effort to get any carnivores to survive due to inefficiencies in the simulator limiting scaling.

Mitigation strategies allowed for up to 800 actors simultaneously, but further work is needed to get scaling to not be O(n^2) with motile actors. The relatively small number of carnivores (Typically less than 3%) prevents their brains from being a significant draw on resources, though every attempt was made to keep their processes lightweight.

N-body simulator

I wanted to make an accurate simulation of our solar system. One thing led to another, and a semi-efficient N-body simulator came out the other end.

Written in Java, it has a home grown graphics system allowing for limited 3d perspective. The UI allows at a glance to see if anything is wrong, as well as displaying vital information about the focused object.

This taught me how to properly manage a large project, as well as how to multithread.

Recently I added the ability to input objects with the standard 6 elements, as well as allowing for disabling the gravity calculation for some objects for quicker running. This allowed for very high speed satellite coverage calculators, and then was used to do pass calculation for my UW orbital project.

3D graphics

After hearing my Maths professor talk about how matrices are used in 3d graphics, I wanted to try it out for myself. It does basic shapes, rotating and translation, and has a fully functioning zbuffer, though the edges of polygons are glitchy. It is written in Java, taking advantage of none of the Matrix classes, and runs very smoothly.

8-bit computer

Based entirely on Ben Eaters design, I wanted to have a project to justify buying hundreds of electrical components. Taught me a lot about the low level functionality of a computer which I then relearned over my time in school

School projects

For various assignments at uWaterloo, I or a team have created a rougelike game in C++, a toned down C language compiler in a functional programming language, an AI that detects licence plates, a variety of TCP and UDP interacting systems, and a whole host of other programs.

I’ve also taken a lot of courses in anthropology and history, two areas of interest of mine.

Fun stuff

I GM a homebrew campaign of p2e, and am an avid walker and board gamer.