Project Portfolio

A collection of projects spanning a wide range of topics. Some are hobby projects, some were work done during my PhD. For now mostly writeups of past projects, but in the future I'll try to write as the project developes.

Hardware Design

Laser Galvo Oscilloscope

An XY laser galvo system connected to stereo microphones to trace lissajous-esque patterns from ambient sound. Somewhere between an art project and a fun audio visualizer.

ESP32 Driven Environmental Sensor and Breakout Board

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  • Status: Rev. 1 in everyday use

Small circuit comprising an ESP32, Temp & Humidity Sensor, LED, USB power and a few breakout pads/pins. Allows for quick integration into various hobby projects. Designed to be flased with ESPHome for integration with home-assistant.

ESP32 Nixie Clock from 1960s Frequency Counter

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  • Status: It's my living room clock!

Reviving some early digital tech and integrating an internet connect esp32 to make the worlds most overkill clock.

Driving and Demodulation of PDH Cavity Locking

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  • Status: Deprecated

Tunable microwave Mod/Demod circuit built as part of my PhD work. Effectively how radio works, but this time for careful control of some state-of-the-art micro optical resonators.

Custom Smart LED Controller for Fairy-Lights

I had some fairy-lights with an annoying IR remote setup in my bedroom. While it worked alright, we fixex the remote in one spot and I'd always hit the wrong button in the dark, or the remote battery would die on occasion. So, with basically a single MOSFET and an ESP32 devboard, I built my own LED controller to drive the lights, and hooked them up to home-assistant as a dimmable light. Much easier to use!

Coding

This Website!

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  • Status: Ever evolving, but you're looking at it!

An easy to make and maintain using mdbook, self-hosted on my home server as well!

Live Preview of Camera Film Negatives

A friend wants to build a system for live viewing their large archive of photo negatives on a light table. So I'm working on programming up some software to fetch a live camera feed and apply enough image processing to get an inverted view of the film. Doesn't need to be a perfect scan, just enough to easily identify the photo contents.

Hanabi Terminal Game

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  • Status: Working but only single player, which doesn't really make sense for this game.

A fun study in rust by programming up a complicated card game, including some useful hints. In theory I want to extend this to actually having an AI you can play with. But compenent computer players for hanabi are actually a current open research topic, so it might be a while.

A modular Experimental Control Framework

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  • Status: Archived

A large part of my PhD work invovled orchestrating the control and readout of several disparate pieces of hardware and test equipment. So I spent a significant time building APIs and GUIs for integrating it all together in python.

Also includes a variety of neat hardware tools, such as auto coordinate transformations for a funky mechanical positioner using three colinear actuators to perform cartesian (XYZ) motion.

Control Code for Remote Undegraduate Lab Experiment

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  • Status: I believe still in use but unsure.

During the pandemic, the physics department had to somehow make in-lab courses function completely remotely. As part of this huge effort I helped rework an experiment to be remotely computer controled. This invovled modifying the hardware a bit to impose additionaly safety, preventing students from crashing the hardware without being there to stop it. While the control code was a good amount of work, just figuring out how to minimally adapt the hardware to get this to work took a while.

Montreal Metro Walking Map

If you're in a given spot of montreal, what is the nearest metro station by walking distance? A fun practice in geoinformatics and ripping data from various web sources.

Smart-Home & Home-Lab

Home Automation with Home-Assistant

I love home automation but hate that for a lot of it you need to hook your devices up to some remote server, only for security exploits to then pop up and leak all your data. So as much as possible I run everything locally! My current system integrates google home devices for voice control (still runs through google but oh well), ikea light bulbs, smart outlets that I've flashed with custom firmware, and a variety of custom built sensors.

Through this I have notifications for my laundry, auto timing on all my plant lights, humidity control, plant watering reminders, music media management and a whole lot of other small things.

Converting Off-The-Shelf Smart Plugs to Custom Firmware

Sonoff S31 smart outlets are a great way to control dumb electronics. But, normally they need to connect to a server to operate. Thankfully, you can flash them with custom firmware like tasmota or esphome to connect them locally to home assistant.

Humdity Control with Custom Sensors

For the benefit of my plants and my lungs in the winter, we have a humidifer in our bedroom. While it could just run all the time, excessive humidity can cause mold growth which isn't great, especially when living in a basement appartment. So, through combining some humidity sensors with a smart outlet in home assistant, we can easily get hygrostat behaviour to maintain humidity at a comfortable 50-60%.

Smartifying Dumb Laundry Machines

At the back of my appartment is a room that houses the hot water tanks for the whole building, as well as a washer and dryer for our unit. We can't really hear them from the rest of the place, so getting notifications when the laundry is done is nice. So by monitoring the power usage of our laundry machine, and the temperature of a sensor strapped to the side of our dryer, we can easily readout when either machine is done, and get home-assistant to notify us!

Repair Projects

Pentax Spotmatic

The pentax spotmatic is one of my favourite film cameras (I have ~10 cameras, three of which are spotmatics). My best working unit annoyingly has a metering switch that doesn't auto shutoff when a photo is taken, draining the battery. Diving into this was like opening up a swiss watch, so many small parts and things to watch out for.

Some 3D prints for a Bronica SQ AI

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  • Status: In Use

To get my big bertha medium format film camera working, I had to model some parts to 3D print, works a charm though!

Pulsed Laser

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  • Status: I believe still in use but unsure.

Troubleshooting and carefully repairing an awesome piece of fiber-optic laser tech.