Summary

I graduated from the University of California, Irvine in June of 2024 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering. While at UCI, I was involved with engineering projects and completed internships with Skyworks and Rekovar. After graduating, I continued with Rekovar as an Embedded Systems Engineer. Due to the nature of industry projects, there's not a whole lot of work products I can display.

Featured Project

I've included some snippets from one my favorite publicly shareable works. At UCI I was electrical lead for the CanSat team. For this competition we designed a landing probe to keep an egg safe during a rocket launch to 1km, while transmitting telemetry data throughout. Our design utilized a multi-stage heat shield which decreased the probe's speed before deploying a parachute. We collected and transmitted telemetry data in real time, consisting of accelerometer, gyroscope, airspeed (via pitot tube), GPS, barometric pressure, battery charge, current draw, and more. All systems and telemetry performed perfectly during launch day, aside from the camera. Due to intermittent overcurrent issues, we decided to disable it just before launch.

PCB Design

The PCB was designed using Altium. We developed requirements during meetings with the operations, mechanical, and software sub-teams before designing the PCB. Component selection was performed after developing power and link budgets to ensure all requirements were met.

I wanted the electrical team to follow an iterative design process. We first constructed a breadboarded circuit to give the software team something to work with. The first PCB revision simply connected breakout boards for each respective sensor to an STM32 Blue Pill. This PCB met nearly all of our requirements aside from power consumption and weight, allowing the software and mechanical teams to perform basic integration testing early on. Due to these stringent weight an power consumption requirements, we developed a second revision with switching converters, less breakout boards, and proper keepouts for optimized RF performance. All boards were hand soldered.

Gallery

We ended up placing 4th in the world! While not a podium place in most other competitions, for this one it was. Thirty teams were selected to participate based on performance in Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews, which were presented to judges throughout the season. Below are some pictures of our manufactured boards, and various other pictures from the competition.

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