Lately, I've been focusing on projects that give me the skills to repair everyday objects. I'm currently working on fabric/fiber arts and thus far have tried my hand at:
* Embroidery
* Sewing
* Patchwork
* Knitting
* Leather Working
After I move soon, I am excited to get back to creating IoT devices for my new space.
For my senior design project done at Iowa State University, I was team lead for a group of five students including myself. The goal of this project was to create a door sensor that contains no replaceable battery on the door or wired power connected to the door. The approach we decided on was a blend between an RF harvesting circuit to power a microcontroller to send door status to the base controller and Channel State Information (CSI) collection and processing. Aside from the duties of facilitating meetings, delegating tasks and focus, and finding outside resources to use as team lead, my development duties were on the CSI side of this project. My efforts developing were spent leading the data processing through various machine learning classification models to determine the angle of the door based on changes in the Wi-Fi’s wave shape information from the CSI frames we transmitted and received back to the base controller.
This was a very fun project to me because it was the most involved in a school project I have ever felt. I contribute this feeling due to the fact that the entire lab setup for data collection was setup in a spare bedroom in my apartment with my fellow teammate. This project took place in 2020, so the shift to at-home work was new to most. The experience this project gave me in not just technical adaptation within work, but also process based adaptation is something that will never leave me.
Is any project ever truly completed?
I have been creating devices for around my home to implement various IoT functionality in my life. Smart lights, smart outlets, motion sensors, task trackers, Wi-Fi sense events, and whatever else I can think of has made its way into my life. Most of the devices are currently integrated into the Google Home environment, but I would like to start focusing on replacing the Google environment with an in-house system so that I may start gathering more data about my life to play around with some personalized analytics about my day-to-day life.
An ESP8266, a relay, and a light switch were all I need to make any light switch at home remotely controllable. My proudest implementation of this configuration was to control the on/off feature of a fireplace, so we could stay could stay comfortable on the couch mid-movie without needed to get up to toggle the fireplace.
This is the only project that I have done so far that has only been hardware. I started with a Dayton Audio puck and a basic audio amplifier. This quick setup worked quite well except that everyone could hear my music, shows, or any other audio out of my desktop. This problem got me a couple complaints from my roommates about the noise levels, so I then built a low-pass filter that allowed me to feel the lower frequencies without my roommates hearing the higher ones. The audio circuitry knowledge I have gained from this project will help me with my ongoing Audio Spectrum Analyzer.
This website is one of the projects that I have done and still am doing, as you can see by the work in progress indicator at the bottom of the page. I grabbed this website's domain during my sophomore year of college somewhere around winter break. Since then I have been using it to further my knowledge of website development.