Engineering Portfolio

I am digitizing more than 8,000 historical QSL cards and contact receipts from the WPI Wireless Association's 116-year analog archive.

A consistent processing workflow preserves the collection as a durable, maintainable digital resource while retaining its connection to the original records.

I built an ESP32-based monitoring system for WPI Wireless Association's radio "Shack" to detect when the space is in use, control an ON AIR sign, and post status updates to Slack.

The system uses a lux sensor for occupancy detection, a moving-average filter to reduce false triggers, relay-controlled signage, Slack API integration, and a 3D-printed enclosure. The design needed to be cheap, reliable enough to run unattended, and simple enough for other club members to maintain.

So far, it has had no false triggers and has not gone down. During the school year, the Slack channel usually updates once or twice a day; over the summer, it slows to roughly once a week.

Wellington's regional council had years of forest restoration data spread across five parks and wanted to know what it actually said. Were the plantings surviving? Could the data show how the program was progressing, and help justify future investment?

My team had six months to work within a program that had already been running for 5–6 years. The scope covered hundreds of planting sites, roughly 343 hectares in total, and contractor survival audits that varied heavily in quality.

I cleaned and organized multi-year contractor survival audit data, then used it to build an ArcGIS map covering the five regional parks. The map included park, planting area, and monitoring site layers, with survival and mortality metrics, custom survival data pop-ups, and attribute tables to make the data easier to interpret.

I also researched possible next steps for future monitoring, including drone imagery, LiDAR canopy-height estimation, photogrammetry, and AI-assisted stem counting, along with the carbon credit and financing background tied to the restoration program.

By the end, the council had a cleaner dataset, a map that made the survival data easier to understand, and a better idea of what remote-sensing tools might make sense as the project progresses.

The show usually uses around 90 mortars, and another 15 to 30 cakes. The runtime changes year to year. The shortest show was about 10 minutes, and the longest was a little over 25.

The firing platform is set up over open water, which gives a natural standoff distance, a safe place for debris to land, and allows more people to watch from their road end docks, or front yards. Firing is handled remotely, so nobody is near the platform during the show. I also clear the date (typically Independence Day) with the local police chief beforehand.

Everything I use is consumer-grade, so it stays within normal local rules and does not require pyrotechnician licensing or special permits.

For me, the best part is picking the shells, building the sequence, and obsessing over pacing. It is still my favorite way to close out the summer.

The 2021 floods in Waverly, Tennessee displaced a lot of families, and Second Chance Ministries was trying to put together emergency shelter for them.

Built in one semester, with a team of fourteen freshman mechanical engineers. It had to run on either grid power or solar, and the design needed to accommodate: mothers with infants, homeless students, someone in a wheelchair, or someone with limited vision.

I was the only CAD modeler on the project, so every dimension and how the parts came together ran through my work. The build itself involved trig for the truss angles, procurement for non-donated parts, and dual-power wiring for its solar and grid modes.

Finished in one semester, delivered, and donated to Second Chance Ministries. Lipscomb's news covered the project.