One of the last side projects I worked on before leaving Big Nerd Ranch was to build a kegerator for the office. We wanted to have beer and nitro iced coffee on draft. We didn’t want to buy a setup for carbon dioxide and nitrogen so we built one.
Category: projects
Ultimate Geek Desk
My desk at work has slowly evolved into a paired-down essentialist work space. It started with a height-adjustable GeekDesk v3. I added a Ergotron desk mount for my external monitor. I also added a Rain Design mStand for my Macbook and several egalo M2 stands for my Android devices. With a set of bluetooth mouse/track pad my desk was complete. However I wanted to use our company 3D printer to make a few small parts to make my work experience even more streamlined.
Ferrari 458 Slot Car Light Upgrade
I recently bought a 1:32 scale Ferrari 458 slot car to run on my slot car track. It is a Carrera Evolution analog car. Unlike the 132 Digital version, this car does not come with LED front or rear lights. I thought it would be a fun project to buy an aftermarket light kit and install some myself. After a lot of surgery, I must say this was a complete waste of time and I would not recommend anyone do this ever. The analog cars are decent quality for the price, but they are not “tuner” friendly. The wires are very delicate and the plastic screw holes that hold the body to the chassis are not meant for repeat tightening. However, if you do choose to take this road, here is how I managed to squeeze all of this together.
Past Work: Electro-mechanical Engineer
I’d posted before about working as an electro-mechanical engineer. Eventually, I left that position to attend grad school. I never wrote about finishing up my work, and left much unmentioned in my prior post. I hope wrap up my involvement at ____ by talking about and showing off some of the projects I was responsible for.
Past Work: Large-Scale Mirror Actuation
When I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech, I worked on a research project for a year. I worked part of the time while still in school and continued after I graduated. I didn’t really have a senior design project and most undergrads didn’t do actual “research”. So, I felt pretty lucky to be involved in a real research project, especially given the level of my involvement. I worked with Dr. Harvey Lipkin and his grad student Russell Marzette Jr. Russell and Dr. Lipkin had developed a new way to actuate (bend and position) really large telescope mirrors and it was my job to develop software to model and test this technique. I wrote some MATLAB and ANSYS code to automate all of my tests. What was really cool (and unknown to me prior) was that I could use ANSYS from the command line and write scripts which match a normal GUI work flow in the 3D environment. I could create structures, apply loads, mesh structures, and run simulations all from scripts. This allowed me to create a MATLAB GUI to set parameters (or sets of parameters), create and execute custom ANSYS scripts, and format ANSYS-generated image and text results. I could set a span of parameters and run an entire batch of ANSYS simulations back-to-back.
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