Please see the subpages Big/Small Projects for my documentation of these projects. 

This page is an outline for what I'm currently up to!

Any skills that I demonstrate here are (for the most part) self-taught, with or without the guidance of my parents, teachers, or friends. The purpose of these is to learn new techniques and apply them in a way that I find creative and/or entertaining. 

In Progress:

Priority #1 right now:

Getting my PC fixed...

Hopefully recover all the files on there

Get new NVMe SSD (Microcenter better give me one for free. I got it 5/20/2023, and it failed 3/8/2024. NOT EVEN ONE YEAR)

I have my windows flash drive still at least so that's not a concern

Portal Radio Alarm Clock:

• Currently working on:

  • Finish soldering capacitors on

  • Wire up Adafruit Soundboard with jumper wires for now

    • Resolder the pins to be upside down. I'm not sure what I was on when I designed the soundboard to go on the underside of the PCB (sarcasm), but that's how I designed it apparently. 

  • Go back through with solder sucker, hot air gun, and resolder some joints

    • I have a certain threshold for what I consider to be an acceptable solder joint, and I spent maybe 45 mins straight of just soldering. After that time, I just wanted to be done with it, but looking back on my work, and I can definitely tell that a few joints have to be redone and are unacceptable even by my low standards lol. Those joints were at the beginning before I found my rhythm. 

• Currently need to buy:

  • More TPIC whatever the code was shift registers. I may have fried some, or something else is going wrong because it's not lighting up the 4 segments I have wired up right now. 

  • More female/female shorter jumper wires. Couldn't find any at microcenter

  • Shorter female breadboard style pins. Just to have on hand if needed to make use of the extra pins I left in the breadboard. 

• Stuff to do:

  • Once I get to Houston solder all the capacitors together, solder some jumper pins to get at least one full 7-seg display on, wire up LCD screen & rotary encoder, wire the adafruit soundboard correctly, & test.

  • Once I get the rest of the jumper wires, wire everything else in & expand my testing to all 4 7-seg displays.

  • Coding. Lots and lots of coding.

    • Main areas of concern (hardest tasks) are going to be making sure the software serial I found still works & deciding how to optimize the use of the 2nd core in monitoring for button presses.

Soda Chiller:

• Currently working on:

  • Figuring out how to design/3d-model with the intention to use waterjet cutter

• Currently need to buy:

  • Aluminum sheets from RPS (figure out thickness)

  • Thermistors/thermocouples or something to measure temperature (research needed)

• Stuff to do:

  • 3D model & manufacture a container to help transfer heat from the can to the Peltier

    • Think of like a metal cup, filled with some liquid to help increase surface area

    • Leave room for insulation. Use non-toxic insulation cause I don't want to deal with nasty stuff in my room

    • Figure out if there's a way to 'glue' sheets of aluminum together. That would mean I can just use a CNC or waterjet cutter to cut the sheets out & stack them on top of each other. Otherwise I have to look into bending the metal or something rectangular. 

  • 3D model & print a housing/frame for all this

Battery stuff:

• Currently working on:

  • N/A

    • This is currently going on the backburner until I have time for it

• Currently need to buy:

  • BMS to handle more batteries

  • Something convenient to hold batteries

    • Soldering wires directly is a lot of work and is high risk. I heard that you can basically just treat it like an AA battery & put it in a holder with springs. I might look into that

• Stuff to do:

  • Figure out how to use more than 1 battery (both in parallel or series)

Template:

• Currently working on:

  • Filler

• Currently need to buy:

  • Filler

• Stuff to do:

  • Filler