merrickslane

User: merrickslane
Email: merrickslane@gmail.com
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Making an AX.25 Modem

June 1, 2023 View Project Code on GitHub During my last quarter at UCR, I took a project-based embedded systems class. The majority of our time outside of class had to be spent working on some project of our own design that incorporated embedded systems. I decided to use that opportunity to incorporate my amateur... Continue reading: Making an AX.25 Modem

Senior Design Project: CubeSat Radio Board

March 30, 2023 View Project Code on GitHub For our two quarter senior design project at UCR, my team made a CubeSat flight computer and radio. I owned the radio board, which consisted of a COTS UHF transceiver for TT&C and a self-developed S-Band transceiver for image downlink, as well as 2x MSP430s to control... Continue reading: Senior Design Project: CubeSat Radio Board

The Pong GPU: Making a Graphics Card from Discrete Logic

July 14, 2021 View Project Code on GitHub Now that I had laid out the architecture for the MCPU-1, I wanted a way to interface some sort of I/O with it. Basic homebrew CPUs typically use something like a simple 2 line LCD or a few seven segment displays. Alternatively, there is also the... Continue reading: The Pong GPU: Making a Graphics Card from Discrete Logic

The MCPU-1: My Second Complete CPU Design

June 16, 2021 View Project Code on GitHub Way back when in early 2017, I demonstrated my first complete CPU and virtual machine that I had programmed in C, which I named the MCPU. It was a 16-bit RISC machine with a lot of peculiarities, such as a fixed-size 16 word call stack and native... Continue reading: The MCPU-1: My Second Complete CPU Design

3D Tic Tac Toe (3D Graphics pt. 2)

April 20, 2021 View Project Code on GitHub After getting my 3D graphics engine to a usable state, it was finally time to actually use it for what it was meant to do: 3D Tic Tac Toe. 3D Tic Tac Toe as a sold game can be traced back to the early 60s, where... Continue reading: 3D Tic Tac Toe (3D Graphics pt. 2)

Making a 3D Graphics Engine from Scratch

April 4, 2021 View Project Code on GitHub After completing my first project using a graphics library, I wanted to try my hand at making an actual game. It would be trivially easy to create 2D game with the plethora of beginner tools available to developers, so I wanted a bit more of a... Continue reading: Making a 3D Graphics Engine from Scratch

Gravitron: A Rudimentary N-body Physics Simulator

March 7, 2021 View Project Code on GitHub While bored during a zoom meeting one day, I began to throw together some code in Python to simulate Newtonian gravitational interactions using the basic kinematic equations and the equation of universal gravitation. This may sound complicated, but it really only involves three or four different... Continue reading: Gravitron: A Rudimentary N-body Physics Simulator

Designing a Telescope Adaptor Before the Planets Align

December 21, 2020 Following summer’s surprise appearance of Comet NEOWISE, winter of 2020 held another rare astronomical event: the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The two closest gas giants have a conjunction from Earth’s perspective every two decades or so, named a “great conjunction” for its intensity and rarity. Johannes Kepler theorized that this conjunction... Continue reading: Designing a Telescope Adaptor Before the Planets Align

Building an HF Direct Conversion Receiver

July 31, 2020 As quarantine drug on into the summer of 2020, I began to reapply my interest in amateur radio. Having just gotten my technician license a few days after new years, I decided it was time to start getting into HF in preparation for obtaining my general license. Since I couldn’t transmit,... Continue reading: Building an HF Direct Conversion Receiver

Comet NEOWISE

July 8, 2020 As an astronomy hobbyist, my only major gripe with the solar system is its predictability. With the motions of nearly all the planetary bodies being so well understood, the exact time of every eclipse, transit, or conjunction can be known centuries in advance. While this doesn’t rob these events of their spectacle,... Continue reading: Comet NEOWISE