The Story So Far

It's time I start keeping some kind of record of all the thing's I make. I'm a creator, I don't claim to be good at everything, but I am good at making things. Some of my projects from the past have no record, but I'll add old ones as I find them. I'm not going to list it all off, it would be better to just show you the old and new projects as I recall and create them. I am a Mechanical Engineering student at UW Milwaukee, I have a welding and fabrication degree which I earned in North Carolina, I've worked as a ranch hand, a welder and an industrial engineer, and freelanced as an artist here and there.

These were our costumes at ECU Halloween 2006, I am not a big sewer, though my mom did teach me how. I designed and created the costume that I'm wearing here. It's actually based off of a pattern for a George Washington costume, the tails and narrow waste worked well. I thought I should include this to show some variety, since at the moment I don't have many pictures but the industrial and electronic stuff. These costumes, along with Kelly and Aaron's march hare and red queen costumes, won the ECU costume contest.

Formula Hybrid 2008, on the NCSU team. This was more fun than I can explain. I was the welder on the team and helped with the frame and built the battery guards and most of the mounting required (that's me on the left in the build picture). We started just six weeks before competition, and took it up to New Hampshire. We finished it in the track side garage, staying up all night and sleeping in a truck was hard, but it was fun. We didn't win anything, but we qualified. And I'm sure they're going to do something great next year. I had to move, so I reluctantly left the NC state team and went to Wisconsin where I transferred to UWM.
Now I'm head fabricator on the UWM ASME's unfortunatly named HPV (human powered vehicle) team. I had a co-op term that interrupted this, but here is a pic of the rolling frame prototype we built up. I may have to limit how much I show of this until competition, for the sake of confidentiality.

I've also recently gotten into electronics. This is a starter project I'm just finishing up, and it will probably be my first full post about a project. It's a RC motor controller, it takes the signal from a RC receiver and will use it to directly control two motors, maybe more. The one shown can only control one. Its using a PIC18F1320 to capture the signal and produce the variable speed motor control signal and a L298 Dual H-Bridge to amplify the chip's output and drive the motor. I'm going to take it to the school lab and use the oscilloscope today to get a better idea of what the timing is of the output from that RC receiver. I've got a program for the chip to interpret many signals at once almost worked out, but I can't get the timing right, so I'm hoping that will help. Once it's all working I'll probably make a little RC tank or a lego motor controller with it.

I respond to comments so ask about anything that interests you.