Engineer's personal statement

Many people ask me how I fell into the engineering world as a devoted designer and artist. Well, believe it or not, all it took was encouragement. During my brief time in community college I found mentors who pushed me to pursue my interest in mathematics. From there, engineering seemed like the perfect mix of math and design. So here I am, artist and engineer, a foot in both worlds.

Embedded Systems (ES)

Embedded software is my primary field of study, and for which I received my B.S. in Engineering from the University of Washington. The majority of my experience comes from working with ARM processors, Arduinos, and RaspberryPis.

Eye Tracker

This project was completed with a partner in the span of two weeks. Our goal was to filter the signal coming from two electrodes placed around the eyes and calculate their difference to determine eye position. Sadly, our butterworth analog filter failed to cancel out excess noise and we ended up creating a heart rate monitor. For the end product, the voltage from one electrode was filtered, sampled by our ADC, transfered to our UART via microDMA, and received via BLE on our custom Android app that graphed the signal over time.

Pointilism Printer

This printing robot was designed by myself and a small team as our senior year capstone project. It would receive an image from our UI via wifi, pixelate the image so that it could be drawn with dots, and the naviagated on-top a drawing surface to plot out the image. My primary responsibility on this project was drafting our requirements, 3D printing and assembling custom parts, debugging/testing the full system, and supporting all software development (from UI to FW).

Stop Light

One of my first projects on a TM4C Tiva Board. I used the IAR Embedded Workbench to develop and test my code. This project used FreeRTOS to control a stoplight with crosswalk buttons.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)

With ES as my primary field of study, FPGAs come in as a close second. Not only did I teach introductory and intermediate digital logic for a full year, I've also developed multiple pipelined CPUs (one with gates and hierarcy, the other with RTL). I thoroughly enjoy working with FPGAs and would love the chance to use them in my professional life.

Frogger

High Level Software

Languages used for script writing and object oriented back-end developement:

Python (advanced)
C/C++ (advanced)
MATLAB (advanced)
Java (intermediate)
Unix bash (intermediate)

My first programming language was C/C++, and it remains my most familiar coding language. However, I have also worked professionally with python, matlab, and bash for script creation, including error analysis, unit testing, and process automation. I've also completed several programming courses in Java for data structures and algorithms.

Front-end Developement

Languages used for front-end developement (all intermediate):

HTML5
CSS
JavaScript

You are currently observing my front-end development skills as I teach myself how to build this website from scratch :)

Hardware

Systems

Most of my professional career I have held the title of Systems Engineer. I started as a NASA intern testing flight software, then completed a second internship doing error analysis with Ball Aerospace, and finally I transitioned to full-time Systems Engineer with Philips Oral Health Care. I chose to start my career in Systems Engineering because I like big picture ideas and tend to think of myself as a multi-disaplinary designer.