nausicaä's portfolio

this serves a dual purpose:

a place to put projects i haven't written up but still want to showcase, and
a convenient link i can hand to people who might want to hire me.

it also has some backlinks to projects i have written up.

if you want a relatively short, current copy of my cv, it's here.

be sure to check out my homepage and the rest of this site!

personal projects

if you want a closer look at my electrical & mechanical engineering, look no further! it will quickly become apparent that i really like onshape, being a unixer. (also: onshape has version control! this is fantastic! all cad should do this.)

ribbon microphone

i designed and built a ribbon microphone from scratch (save the transformer). also see the cad model (pictured below) and the hacker news discussion.

sstc 1

i built a small sstc. this entry will likely be replaced once i finish the bigger one i'm working on.

coil winding machine

a project i and gf are working on together. i've done most of the cad, she's written most of the code.

compressor pedal

this is the cad for the guitar compressor i designed. i intended it to be as easy to assemble as possible, making a full cad model basically a necessity to ensure everything fit correctly. it was basically successful in this.

svalboard-like key cluster

this is an old project that's mostly inactive right now, but i spent quite a bit of time creating experimental key clusters akin to the svalboard's. there's an exciting offshoot of this that's not ready to publish yet, so stay tuned. ;)

18xx tiles

basically just a stunt to see if i could do this without a truly insane number of features, but they turned out reasonably well. i'll eventually make these more of a thing, because i really like trains. (maybe you figured that out from context already.)

platonic solids plus

also a stunt, one of the first things i did with onshape (back when i was pretty new to cad). i think it's a cool exercise, especially when you're new.

academic projects

i did all of these projects while getting an electrical engineering degree at the cooper union. my old name is all over these documents. oh well. these are roughly ordered from most to least interesting (imo). this section does not cover everything i did at cooper, just the projects i have convenient reports for.

induction tea heater

this was my junior year project (along with two friends). i did most of the circuit design for this one. note: the particular way we tuned the resonant load only works if it's pretty high q. marco denicolai's slr converter inspired the waveform.

lorenz attractor as an analog computer

i built an analog computer that live-computes ed lorenz' famous strange attractor for a course in chaos theory. it's definitely one of the prettiest things i've built, so i'll share a photo:

a breadboarded analog computer — the computer that runs the linked video.

16-qam 5.4 GHz vector modulator

i and a classmate designed a vector modulator in keysight ads (including component selection) for our class in microwave engineering. be warned: our professor required we include all datasheets in the final report, so the above pdf is enormous.

software-defined radio

my friends and i built an sdr for the 20 m ham band. it's not the most impressive thing that i've done, but i'll include it here for completeness.

rf protoboard oscillators

i and two classmates prototyped a variety of oscillators for our antenna design class, ranging from 31 MHz to 1 GHz. evan takes the credit for soldering that last one.

old stuff

i don't have materials handy for a lot of my pre-2023 projects; they're in an old backup of my old upstream somewhere. eventually i will dig them out. until then, enjoy some photos from my slr (series load resonant) converter project from 2021:

a pretty transformer — the 15 kV, 2 kW transformer that was the beating heart of the converter. this went into a paint can under oil.

a hot arc between metal rods — obligatory arc shot at reduced voltage (about 6 kV). rods were roughly 5 cm apart at this point.