Welcome
Hello! I'm Walter Gordy, an Electical Engineering student at the University of New Mexico. This site is for putting many of the projects I've done for fun. You can always email me, but I'm not great at responding right away. I also have a flickr page and a youtube page. Enjoy!
Thermal Profiles of PS3 / Xbox 360 - 2009
This is just fun with a thermal camera. We wanted to compare the relative thermal differences between the game consoles. Turns out the new playstation 3 slim was the warmest of the consoles while the xbox 360 elite was the coolest.
Simulated Wind Effects on Lightweight UAV - 2008
Project Objectives:- Simulate Aircraft Flight Characteristics
- Simulate Wind
- Simulate GPS location drift and introduced error
- Develop appropriate navigation functions to compensate for errors and deviations in the flight path
- Test scenarios that would be difficult to monitor in a real world test
- Develop new functionality without risking the aircraft
This project started by discovering the power of Atmel's 8-bit processors and playing with a simple demo board. I wrote code to control servos, process gps, and make calculations all with only 1k of ram. I moved on to writing code that ran on a pda and drove a remote control truck around a field using only gps. That system provided easy feedback for debugging and a user interface to view the course the truck would take. It led to the design and of a circuit board to shrink the size of the pda, gps, and servo controllers to fit onto a single board. As I have tested the system on a plane I noticed that nature has some variables that just take too much time to troubleshoot in the field. I created this applet to simulate the affects of wind and gps drift on my flight system. With any luck this will lead to better firmware that is more capable of adapting to an ever changing environment.
