Closed-Loop Linear Motor Driver for Ultrasound Probe Stabilization

Power Electronics Laboratory, Spring 2021

This project developed a motor driver and controller capable of position control for a linear motor. PWM modulation creates sinusoidal phase voltages for the motor instead of square waves, which allows for much smoother movement and control. In future work, this could be used to provide constant, user-determined force on a surface regardless of hand position for ultrasound probe stabilization.

Overcooked: Food-programmable Gate Array

Digital Systems Lab, Fall 2020

I teamed up with classmates to program an FPGA version of Overcooked, the video game. I was responsible for implementing the game logic, while my teammates implemented the graphics and network communications.

Overcooked is a traditionally multiplayer cooking game where players must prepare and serve dishes under time pressure. During a round, the players are presented with orders which must be completed within a short time window, otherwise they lose points. Food that is cooked too long catches on fire. Our project implements a streamlined version of the original video game.

Accelerating Equitable Electrification in Portland and South Portland, Maine

MIT Policy Hackathon, Fall 2021

Over the course of 36 hours, I worked with my team of three to write a policy memo describing our suggestions to improve the transportation development plan for the cities of Portland and South Portland, Maine as they adapt to climate change. My team received first place in the transportation policy category.

PHEBCS: Passive House Exterior Blinds Control System

Analog Electronics Laboratory, Spring 2020

Passive houses primarily rely on their architecture and the environment to maintain a comfortable temperature for their inhabitants. Specifically, they have large windows on the south-side with large eaves that block the high sun in the summer and allow for more sunlight in the winter when the sun is low. This energy harvesting can be amplified by exterior blinds on the south side with our sensor-controlled system, PHEBCS. PHEBCS uses temperature and wind speed readings to determine when to raise and lower the blinds to keep the temperature inside the house within the desired range. To implement this, I reverse-engineered the RF signal of the blinds' remote, and programmed a Raspberry Pi to automatically raise and lower the blinds based on wind speed and local temperature.

Switched Capacitor A/D Converter Input Buffer

CMOS Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Design, Spring 2021

The objective of this project was to design and simulate an input buffer suitable to drive a switched-capacitor A/D converter in Cadence.

Publications

“Development of a Deployable Optical Receive Aperture”

U. S. Escobar et al. (incl. J. Arnold), "Development of a Deployable Optical Receive Aperture," 2022 IEEE Aerospace Conference (AERO), pp. 1-8 (2022), doi: 10.1109/AERO53065.2022.9843512. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9843512/.

“Deployable Optical Receiver Array CubeSat”

A. Talamante, et al. (incl. J. Arnold), “Deployable Optical Receiver Array CubeSat”, Proc. Small Satellite Conference, Mission Operations and Autonomy, 263 (2021). https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2021/all2021/263/.

“Blending Synthetic and Measured Data using Transfer Learning for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Target Classification”

J. Arnold, L. Moore, and E. Zelnio, “Blending Synthetic and Measured Data using Transfer Learning for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Target Classification” in Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, Proc. SPIE Defense+Security (2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2304568.