Mechagainers

Designed and implemented a feedback control system for a physical rotational rig driven by compressed air through a proportional servo valve. We derived the dynamics from first principles, tuned the controller using root locus and frequency response methods, and validated it on the hardware — a test apparatus the department affectionately calls the Wheel of Despair.

Modeled the full dynamics of a dual-propeller experimental platform free to move in pitch and yaw. We started from analytical derivations, ran experiments, and when the textbook constants turned out to be off by a factor of ten, re-identified everything directly from real data using least squares and gradient descent in MATLAB. Ended up with three validated coupled models accounting for nonlinear friction and a moment of inertia that changes with pitch angle.

Built a line-following robot from the ground up in bare-metal C on a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller. Wrote drivers for IR sensors, PWM motor control, an LCD display, ADC and DAC, and circular UART buffers — then tied it together with a hierarchical state machine and integrated an ESP32 module for WiFi-based remote control.