Projects
Things I built, broke and rebuilt
Each project is documented end to end: the problem, the objective, the tools, the failures and what comes next.
Vega-1 Sounding Rocket
Active
- Problem statement
- Our club had no reusable platform to validate recovery and avionics together.
- Objective
- Fly a 2.4 m airframe to 1.2 km with dual-deploy recovery and full telemetry.
- Timeline
- Jan 2026 — ongoing
- Lessons learned
- Mass margin discipline matters more than any single clever subsystem.
- Upcoming improvements
- Carbon fin can, redundant altimeter, live LoRa downlink.
Fusion 360
OpenRocket
Ansys
STM32
Python
Regeneratively Cooled Thruster Study
Active
- Problem statement
- Ablative throats limited our burn duration to a few seconds.
- Objective
- Model channel cooling for a 200 N class thruster and validate against test data.
- Timeline
- Mar 2026 — ongoing
- Lessons learned
- A 1D coupled model gets you 80% of the answer before any meshing.
- Upcoming improvements
- Prototype copper liner and cold-flow campaign.
MATLAB
CFD
CAD
Thermal FEA
Custom Quadcopter Flight Controller
Completed
- Problem statement
- Off-the-shelf firmware hid the control theory I wanted to learn.
- Objective
- Write a cascaded PID stack from scratch on bare-metal hardware.
- Timeline
- Aug 2025 — Dec 2025
- Lessons learned
- Sensor filtering choices dominate perceived stability.
- Upcoming improvements
- Port the estimator to a complementary + Kalman hybrid.
C
STM32
IMU fusion
PID
CanSat Atmospheric Payload
Planned
- Problem statement
- Student launches rarely carry meaningful science payloads.
- Objective
- Build a 350 g payload logging pressure, humidity and particulate data.
- Timeline
- Q4 2026
- Lessons learned
- Documenting requirements early prevents scope creep.
- Upcoming improvements
- Sensor selection and drop-test rig.
PCB design
Embedded C
Data analysis