For fun.
One of my greatest joys in life is using technology to create fun, particularly those that can be enjoyed by people — it’s as simple as that. I like to use a hands-on approach to designing mechatronic systems, where I have a good amount of experience with analog and digital circuits, multi-layered circuit boards, rapid prototyping (e.g., soldering, 3D printing, laser cutting), and am well-versed in a variety of sensors and actuators. Over the years, I built my own home lab (the image on the left was taken during my years at Cal Poly), which allows me hack, design, and build electronic hardware.
The topic of my Master’s thesis was to develop a system for visual telepresence, in a way that is seamless and natural for the end-user. My system used a virtual reality head mounted display (i.e., Oculus Rift DK2) to control the direction of a camera, which also provided real-time camera feedback to the user. I designed, fabricated, and tested custom hardware and software to construct a working prototype.
When I served as a lecturer at Cal Poly, I designed the electronics for the famous IME156 class, which eventually became the EDM Prism, a microcontroller-powered light show in a box (click the image to find out more!). This project eventually became an integral part of the engineering curriculum at Cal Poly, and still continues to be popular among students.
As part of a graduate-level term project, my buddy (Victor Espinoza) and I designed a free-standing CNC-style whiteboard robot. We designed the entire device from scratch using extruded aluminum T-slot framing, custom electronics, and device drivers/software written in Python and C++. Being the poor students that we were, we even jury-rigged PC power supply to power the whole thing.
During my last few years at Cal Poly, I had the rare opportunity to play with an Allen Bradley PLC and Keyence machine vision system (cumulatively valued at over $300K at the time), which is used to control industrial automation systems for manufacturing (and theme park attractions). I designed a system which included a linear table-top actuator and solenoid valve to automatically dispense liquid into cups using compute vision as part of the control system. These PLCs are pretty easy to work with, considering it only took me about a day to design, build, and test it!