ABOUT.SYS

I'm a computer engineering student at Auburn, on the electrical engineering track. I work on attitude control hardware for CubeSats.

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I came to it sideways. I finished a mechanical engineering degree at UCCS in 2021, then spent three seasons running a 35-foot parasail vessel out of Gulf Shores; 15 passengers a trip, 10 to 12 trips a day, eight months a season. I held the USCG Master license, so I made the daily weather go/no-go call, ran the safety briefings, supervised a deckhand, and handled engine and electrical repairs.

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I was good at that job. It was also the same season on repeat, and nothing I did on the water outlasted the trip. I came back to engineering because I wanted to work on things that were bigger than me and that still mattered after I stopped touching them.

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Spacecraft fit that. The part I wanted to work on was the electronics, control hardware, flight boards, the things that have to keep working once the vehicle is out of reach, and computer engineering was the direct route to it.

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ASTRA-ETHEREA

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ASTRA-ETHEREA is a 3U CubeSat built by Auburn's Small Satellite Program. The mission measures the increase in de-orbit rate produced by an electromagnetic tether. I own the magnetorquer system.

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The X and Y axes originally used internally wound coils. I moved them into the solar panel PCBs so the loops could span the full long face of the bus. The larger loop area cut power consumption 30% and raised torque 15%; 0.22 A·m² dipole moment at 0.28 W per axis. I'm laying out those 6-layer boards in Altium now, routing the coils alongside the solar array. Hardware is in V0 with PDR upcoming.

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The controller is an FPGA design in Verilog. It accepts serial commands from the ADCS board, drives the coils through multiple H-bridges with PWM, and monitors coil temperature.

Coil-to-coil variation was the limiting factor on hitting a repeatable dipole moment, so I built a winding machine. It winds to an entered spec with automatic turn counting and constant wire tension. Mechanism modeled in Fusion 360, control board designed in KiCad, two NEMA 17 steppers on BigTreeTech drivers, firmware on Arduino Micro.

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Capstone

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Space Mission Design capstone under Dr. David Guzzetti: a mission to test whether programmable dust, composite particles that use solar radiation pressure to raise their orbital velocity, can be used to de-orbit debris. I'm working the dust-telescope payload.

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DreadKnot Supply

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I design and sell 3D-printed products. Fourteen designs, 5,000+ units, a seven-printer FDM line, sold through Etsy, Shopify, eBay, Amazon, and four B2B accounts.

The useful part has been the cost feedback loop. Print time, material selection, and packed volume all land directly in margin, so I iterate designs against real manufacturing cost instead of estimating it. One concrete example: I printed breakaway tabs into multi-part designs so the pieces come off the bed already held together, which eliminated plastic bags from several products and cut packaging cost by $1.30 per unit.

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What I'm looking for

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A Summer 2027 internship or co-op in embedded systems, FPGA design, or space and defense hardware. I'm most interested in hardware that can't be serviced after deployment, where the analysis has to be right before it ships.

U.S. citizen, eligible for security clearance.