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.

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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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