November 2024

I've been working on these on and off for the last couple years - finally posting it now because I think I'm done with them for the time being, time to move on to the next iteration... coming soon!

The idea is simple - you can make a circuit using copper tape and some basic components and stick it wherever you want. I made a collection of cards and journals for friends and family. It's a simple gift that people seem to really like, so I made a lot of them!

I developed a process cutting out the designs on my 3D printer. I had modified it by adding a drag knife and had been using it as a vinyl cutter. The process was quite involved though so the last two designs (dragon and car) I ended up cutting out by hand.

October 2024

This is an SAO I put together for Hackaday Supercon 2024. I hadn't planned on putting together an SAO - I already had a few of the bird SAOs leftover from the last conference I attended, but my friend convinced me otherwise (you can see his awesome SAO here).

I didn't have much time so I wanted to put something together that was relatively simple, could be fully assembled by a board house overseas, and involved an analog circuit (I am speaking about analog design at the conference, it felt wrong to show up with a microcontroller on my SAO).

I came up with this - a big flashing arrow featuring your name! For some reason most awesome conference badges are missing a place to write your name - so this solves that problem while also adding a bunch of flashing LEDs. Who doesn't love flashing LEDs?

You can find all my design files here, and if you find me at Supercon I might have an extra for you!

August 2024

Engineering students at the University of Toronto have a tradition of decorating hard hats. My friend Jennifer and I wanted in but we didn't want to stick to the usual modifications. So... we stuck a Raspberry Pi with a display into ours and put it in kiosk mode so you can display whatever you want! 

Jennifer made a website that takes submissions from a google form and then posts whatever you submit on the hard hat for everyone to see (except for the person wearing it of course). You can imagine we had some fun with this - both at Frosh Week and at a fundraising dinner.

You can checkout the GitHub repository Jennifer put together here, and checkout more of her work here.

Oh also, it plays Doom!

July 2024

Recently my grandmother was in need of a walker - but I didn't think an ordinary walker would do. Inspired by this Top Gear episode that my grandmother and I both love I made some modifications. 

I added three features - lights, a horn, and a water gun! For the lights I used some RGB LED strip I had, this meant I could have both a white light mode so my grandmother can see where she's going and a flashing rainbow mode. The horn was a car horn, and for the water gun I disguised a water pump in a cup. Everything can be controlled by three buttons that I placed up near the handles.

Everything is being controlled by an Arduino Nano. There were a few challenges with this because all the accessories are powered using a 12V battery. For the LED strip I was able to pull the anodes down using NPN devices, but for the horn and the water pump I needed something a little more sophisticated. I came up with a simple level shifter / high current driver circuit using a couple discrete BJTs and it works surprisingly well!

 To attach everything to the walker I used zip ties - the intention was to make everything easily removable if any of the modifications make the walker more difficult to use.

I'm pleased to report my grandmother loved it and has been having fun sharing all the features with her friends! Especially the disguised water gun.

May 2024

I attended the Open Hardware conference in Montreal in early May. The conference had an awesome badge that supported the SAO standard. I knew I wanted to make an analog add-on and settled on a bird. This bird was heavily inspired by Kelly Heaton's work. My circuit was quite a bit simpler - I used two oscillators. One generated a tone (around 1kHz) and the other pulsed the tone on and off (around 4Hz). The idea was to create a sort of chirping sound - it definitely ended up sounding more like robot bird than a regular bird, but it worked reliably and was a ton of fun to share at the conference. I ended up giving away 15 of them and have 5 more - so if you want one I'll be giving the rest away at Supercon in November so come find me there! If you are curious you can find all my design files here.

April 2024

Sometime in February after receiving and testing my Tiny Tapeout Synthesizer I noticed the next Tiny Tapeout Shuttle (Tiny Tapeout 6) was going to include support for analog designs. Having spent the last year working as an analog design intern and learning full custom design - I knew I had to submit something!

This happened to coincide with my purchase of an electric violin and subsequent interest in building my own guitar pedals - so I decided I had to tapeout my own guitar pedal.

This project was a little more involved than my usual, and in the process I also noticed there isn't a whole lot of publicly available information on designing integrated circuits - so I put together a proper write up of the project. You can read it here!

April 2023

I took an embedded design course as part of my winter semester and as part of the course, we were given the option of working on a final project. I had had this toy according sitting on my shelf waiting to be electrified for the last couple years, so my friend and I decided now was the time!

I prepped the accordion by turning each of the valves (originally designed to open and close to control air over a set of metal reeds) into an electrical switch. I did this by covering each of the pads with copper tape and putting metal contacts on either side of the holes each pad covers. Now - when I push a button on the accordion the pad is lifted and the circuit is broken.

These new switches were wired to an STM32 Nucleo development board (required for the course). My partner wrote a program that used the DAC to generate a note of the desired frequency depending on which buttons were currently being pressed. This was then output via a 1/4" jack and could be plugged into a normal guitar amp.

I took the accordion with me to LA in the fall to share at Hackaday Supercon - it was a hit!

November 2022

Sometime in October I learned about the tiny tapeout project - and definitely wanted to be a part of it! Having only barely begun to learn about integrated circuits in school at the time, I was excited that anyone could participate using the online circuit teaching tool WokWi.

I wanted to create something simple and fun - so I made a little synthesizer! It is designed to play a C scale using a counter. When an input is toggled, the counter is repeatedly reset at a specified value which should result in a square wave output at the frequency of the desired note. We will see if it works! I am still waiting on the chip to arrive.

This design was submitted as a part of tiny tapeout 2 - I look forward to participating in future tapeouts now that I know significantly more! Maybe an analog design?

April 2022

As part of my winter semester I participated in ECE295, the first run of University of Toronto's first hardware design course. As part of the course we were split into groups of three, each group tasked with building a different part of the radio.

My group was in charge of the transmit mixer, we designed a Gilbert Cell quadrature mixer using discrete transistors. I think we chose a more difficult design than we initially realized, though after a lot of hard work, and a lot of learning and support from the teaching team, we were able to pull it off!

We named our final design QAT, and after a lot of troubleshooting (we had inverted half our transistor footprints) we were able to get it working! To top it all off, we won the first place prize in the course for design and teamwork.

March 2022

I have always wanted a clap on clap off light - I know we have voice assistants, but this seems cooler for some reason.

I started the project over the winter holidays, designing a circuit using a piezo buzzer as a microphone. I amplified the signal from the buzzer using an op-amp. Next, I used a 555 timer like a switch de-bouncer to create a longer, consistent, pulse when a sound over a set volume is detected. I then forgot about the project for a couple months.

Fast forward to March, I got stuck at home for a few days with a cold, and used the time to finish this project! I used a Programmable Logic Device (PLD) to control the circuit. I simulated a logic circuit in Logisim, and then created the final version in the GreenPAK software. It was a little different than writing the circuit in Verilog, but it was pretty cool! I will definitely be playing with these more in the future. 

I designed an enclosure in OpenSCAD, 3D printed it, and now I use the clapper daily as a reading light. At some point in the future I may redesign the case, it blocks most of the sound so now I have to tap it to turn it on and off, but it is still a cool little light!

February 2022

I have been making piñatas to give as birthday gifts, I figure they are the perfect home-made gift: fun, inexpensive, and you get to destroy them so they don't take up a lot of space!

This was my second piñata, last time I used a laser cutter to cut the outline of Kermit the Frog, and then used a hot glue gun and scrap cardboard to make him 3D. This time I wanted to reduce how long it took to put together, and decided to draw a model that can be cut out and glued together relatively quickly. I came up with this bee, and the design worked very well! I started by drawing the model in AutoCAD, once I had cut it out I glued the pieces together and covered it in the tissue paper squares. 

I think it turned out very nicely!

December 2021

I was working on my nightlight project, and everything was going very well until disaster struck! The omicron variant caused cases of covid-19 to surge and I wasn't allowed back into the lab to laser cut the rest of images I had planned. So I had to figure something else out.

I had a bunch of PCBs (I may have over-ordered slightly) designed to edge light acrylic, but no way to etch acrylic at home. I also did not have the time to use a non-computerized manufacturing method, as Christmas was only a few days away. I decided I would try making some lithophanes using my 3D printer! 

I designed a parametric model that takes the output from an online lithophane generator, and automatically sets it in a base that was compatible with my PCB. It took some experimentation, but it worked very well. I only had clear PETG available for my printer, so I discovered I could get acceptable results by thickening the lithophane. I doubled the thickness recommended for white PLA. I think it worked very well, and the people I gifted them to were even more impressed than the ones that were gifted the acrylic variation!

December 2021

Around Christmas I decided to take a unique approach to gift giving, and came up with this project! I wanted to accomplish two things - use the laser cutter I had available at the maker space, and design a custom PCB.

In Toronto as part of a business area improvement project a bunch of laser cut edge lit acrylic panels were hung along light posts, and they were very pretty, so I decided to try it for myself. I did not have the time to learn how to draw as nicely as the designs displayed in the city, so I settled on edge lit pictures of pets. I rastered images of pets onto the clear acrylic sheets using the laser, and then set about figuring out how to light them up!

I did not want to solder a thousand LEDs for Christmas, so I settled on a custom PCB which I designed and had assembled by JLCPCB. Thankfully the PCBs worked on the first try. Once I had the PCBs and the acrylic, I designed a base for them using Openscad and 3D printed them at home. I think the project turned out very nicely!

November 2021

While working as a maker space assistant at the University of Toronto I worked on a motorized Rube Goldberg machine for the engineering faculty's annual holiday video. 

Working with the other staff in the space we designed the machine to showcase all the different fabrication methods we have available, making use of the laser cutter, 3D printers, and a few electronic components. 

I helped with the construction of the mechanical parts, but mostly worked on motorizing the machine using a NEMA17 stepper motor controlled by an Arduino and stepper driver.

The speed of the motor could be controlled by modifying a single value in the Arduino code. I did this to simplify the circuit, knowing that everyone using the machine was comfortable modifying the code. Unfortunately, all the computers in the space were wiped the day before filming and my code was lost. I was away at the time so there was no way to modify the speed. Next time I work on a project like this I will definitely implement some method for controlling the speed in hardware.

You can see the holiday video here: https://bit.ly/holidayengvideo

October 2021

This was one of the first projects I worked on as a maker space assistant at the University of Toronto. Before I arrived that day someone had 3D printed this pumpkin, and we decided it could use some lights. 

I used a 555 timer in an astable configuration with two BJT transistors (one PNP and one NPN) to achieve the alternating blinking affect. This circuit was soldered onto a breadboard and glued behind the eyes.

September 2021

I made a light up card to mail to a friend! I had this idea while away from home for the summer, sending letters back to my friends at home. I enjoyed drawing pictures, but thought I could have a little more fun with it!

I started by creating two parallel paths with copper tape, I tried to keep a consistent distance between them so I could then go back and solder some yellow SMD LEDs along the path. I went with 806 sized LEDs, they were a good balance between being small enough to fit in a card, but large enough to lay traces and solder them by hand.

I lay an image of fireflies on top, the original plan was to draw my own forest, but I had trouble seeing the lights through my drawing and found they were much more visible through the toner.

I plan on trying this again for future letters, I think next time I will use a 555 timer or an Attiny10 microcontroller to add some animation to the LEDs.

March 2021

As part of my first year engineering design course, I led my team of 6 students to create a teaching toothbrush for a client. Our client was looking for a way to reduce his stress when teaching his young children to brush their teeth. 

My group developed a toothbrush with an accelerometer and pressure sensor to record brushing motions. The plan was to use the data collected to provide feedback to the child in a game, the game would reward good brushing habits. 

The project concluded with a prototype toothbrush, the exterior was 3D printed and fitted with an off the shelf pressure sensor and accelerometer. The sensor data was processed by an Arduino and sent to a computer where we processed the accelerometer and pressure sensor data using a Python script. This data was used to show the feasibility of the project, future steps would be to improve the accuracy of the accelerometer, and developing a game to present the data.

March 2020

When the pandemic first began a friend and I decided we wanted to work on a small project to pass the time. Earlier that week I had visited an electronic surplus store, and found a collection of LED matrices that I thought could be useful, we used one of them along with a couple shift registers to create a miniature arcade game. 

I designed the driver circuit for the display using the two shift registers, they were recycled from an old PCB I had found, so I learned how to work with SMD ICs. I then designed a 3D printed enclosure for the board and the buttons that looked like a small arcade cabinet. 

My friend worked on the software side of the project and wrote a program that randomly generated a maze, and then scored the player based on how long it took to solve. It had a couple different game modes, and was running on a Raspberry Pi. 

It was certainly an interesting project! If revisited I would like to run the game using a microcontroller rather than the Raspberry Pi to reduce cost and power consumption. I think it will also greatly simplify the design, and will allow everything to fit in the one enclosure without losing too much game functionality.

September 2018

I had recently attempted starting a Maker Club at my school, my idea was it would be a club for people who wanted to build whatever they wanted. Unfortunately "whatever you want" confused people and I had trouble recruiting. I decided I needed a sample project that grabbed people's attention. I didn't want it to be too complicated, I wanted people to be able to see themselves making it, so they would want to come!

I came up with these animatronic snakes - I used a 9g servo sweeping through all of its positions, being controlled by an Attiny85. This was a little complex, but I had the circuit and code prebuilt from a past project that didn't work, so I made use of the pre-assembled circuit. I then made the cave from recycled styrofoam, and used dollar store wooden snakes, moved back and forth with wire connected to the motor. I wanted the eyes to light up - so I drilled out the eyes and replaced them with small pieces of fibre optic cable, and then put one LED in the base of each head.