Email: jweaston99@gmail.comAddress: 6801 Jester Blvd, Austin TX, 78750 Phone: 361-484-1245
I am a forth-year Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin. I currently live in Austin TX where I was born but I grew up in Victoria TX.
I enjoy riding my bike, playing tennis, practicing guitar, playing video games, and messing with technology. I have
a
great
appreciation for technology as it makes our lives much easiesr. Throughout the years I have worked on a multitude of
projects
many of which you might be interested in as an employer or just because you think they're cool.
Here is a link to my resume
Now you might be thinking that this website is hosted on some soulless server farm with hundreds of servers crammed together in a tiny area but you would be wrong. This server is hosted right here in Austin TX, in my bedroom.... under my desk. It's being run on a Linux machine that was built by me out of a bunch of old PC parts that I naturally source. No prebuilts here, no sir.
This project started out as a way to host a Minecraft server off my main PC and to be able to run it 24/7. I dug up a bunch of PC parts from old builds and from my Dad and after some work got it to run Linux. I wanted it to not need a monitor so I learned how to connect to it remotely with SSH and how to navigate a Linux terminal. I learned how to set up WOL(wake-on-LAN), how to port-forward all the different services to my server and much more. Eventually, I decide "hey I'll try making a website" so I download apache to my server and started learning HTML/CSS/PHP as well. Thats right, this whole website was hand coded by me and thats why this website looks like its from the early 90s (Maybe some day I'll cave and use a professional website builder but I feel like the hand coded html gives it character). What you see now is the culmination of that work and it is still an on going project that I try to update when I have free time.
Back in highschool one of our projects was to create a paper speaker using a copper wire, a magnate, a cup, and well... paper. After plugging oscilator into the two ends of the wire it made a sound. Neat right! Well I though we could do better so I found and old aux cord, cut and stripped it, and solderd it to the copper wire. I then decided to 3D print the cone and base as well since our school had just gotten a 3D printer. Once I had implemented the improvements you could plug your phone into it and actually hear music! Very quiet thought. But this still wasn't good enough for me. I decided to build an amplifer for it using a breadboard, some loose wires, some resisters, capacitors, potentimometers, and a circuit blueprint I found online. (Heres the link if you're interested in making your own) After putting that together and hooking it up to the speaker you could hear it with out having to put your head right next to it.
After I did this I kept telling myself I could make a PCB for the amp and actually solder it together. Well that day finally came and I went online and figured out how to get a custome PCB board made. I decided to order one from a manufacter rather than try to etch my own as that seemed very difficult and would be way to hard for what I was trying to do. I use the same templete from the previous site and ordered it. After it finally came in I put it all to gether and now it works great!Or it did till I broke it :(
As mentioned previously my senior year of highschool our school got a 3D printer for the engineering classes. I was put in charge of it by my teacher because I guess she trusted me and I actually new how to use it. Later in the year towards the end of the semester my teacher suggested I look into the program called e-nable. This was an online community of people who 3D print prothetics for children due to this being cheaper and easier to maintain for children.You can read about it more here I decide to go ahead and try it. My teach reached out to our local community and found an 8 year-old girl who had lost her had at birth. We comminicated with the family and asked if she would like us to make a prosthetic for her. She said yes so I went to meet her and her mom to take the measurements of her arm. I then modified the template of the CAD file and sent it to print. After a couple days of work I got it printed to put together.
And later I got to see the little girls face when she recieved it.
I also got my name put in the newspaper which was pretty cool.
My first year of college I took a engineering design class where we learned to
use and CAD program called Solid Works. The final project of this class was group
project we had to choose some simple machine or mechanism and model each part in
Solid Works and then 3D print out each of these parts. Our group choose to do a
wind up car motor. After disassembling the car motor we drew out each of the parts
on engineering paper.
We then took these drawings and modeled each part in Solid Words and then put them
also together in a single model
Here is the final exploded View
Finally after we had each of the parts we printed them out
As an aerospace engineer I am required to take a low-speed aerodynamics class. That
class involves a lab using a wind tunnel. In this lab our final report
involved an experiment of our own design. We chose to analyze how the spin
of baseball affect its flight. To do this we had to design and build an
apperatus to test the baseball in the wind tunnel. This consisted of two
2x4s, a metal dowel rod, two bearings, an a power drill.
While crude, the device preformed quiet well and got us the data we needed.
Speaking of data this project requied a lot of data manupulation. We had to
gather wake profile data for 3 different spin speeds, 2 different orindations
and 4 different wind speeds. Each test collected data for 10 second every
1/100 of a second. I was in charge of manipulating all this data into a
readable and presentable format. Luckly I've had a lot of experience with
this as I actually did MS Execl competitivley in highschool (I didn't think
this was a thing either but it is. I actually made it to regionals a couple
of times)
Under construction
During one of my sensior year engineering classes we signed up for a
competition at the University of Texas A&M to design, build, and operate
a hydraulic based crane in a series of chanllenges from stacking wooden
blocks, to lifting a weight soda can over a wall, to placing ping pong balls
on a pedestal. For this project our class devided into teams. The team I was
apart of I was made the team lead. The first thing I did was come up with a
time table for our group. We knew we when the completion was so I wanted to
make sure we had time to design build and practice with our crane.
I had our team start by doing research on
various cranes that were already in use around the world. After a day or
two of research I had our team brainstorm what we though the best design for
our crane would be given the chanllenges present to us. We went for a very
typical design with swivel base, a pivotoing arm that allowed for extension,
and a free hanging claw grabber. I then furth sub devided the team into
design groups for each of the parts of the crane. One team for the grabber,
one for the pivot base, and one for the arm. We had to decided on a matrial
to build the crane out of and because of my previous experience working with
tetrix I though they would be a great modular building matrial with which to
construct our crane. Though this would not cover the entirety of our
matrial needs. The claw it self would need to be make out of a smaller more
delicate material. For this we decided to use K'NEX. These small modular
plastic pieces would be great for building a claw. There was one issue that
was plaguing each of the team though and that was how we would attach the
hydrualics system. We were going to use medical tubing and various sizes of
syringes. Since we had recently recieved a 3D printer for our class I got to
work on design mounts for the syringes to be attached to the crane at
various points and to various materials. After about a month of tinkering
redesigning and building we finailly had a build that we were happy with
we decided to start testing it out on the tasks. With a little bit of
practice on the operaters side the crane worked flawlessly.
Once we had gotten use to the controll we were ready for the competition.
Finailly the day came where we packed up the crane and drove to
college station. Once we arrived we took our crane very carefully to the
staging room and dropped it off. We got a look at our competition and were
a little scared. Some people had put a lot of effort into building their
cranes and had even had time to decorate them. Then the time had come to
compete. We picked up our crane and carried it to the arena area and started
working on the tasks. We felt confident about our abilities and the crane
preformed prefectly and we ended up wining first place.
During my highschool robotics course we were tasked with desgining and
building a robot that could go into a room, detect and find hazardous waste,
colect the waste and store it in indivual containers, and leave the area.
To test this on a smaller scale we built a small wooden enclosure to act as
the room and use infrared immiting plastic spheres to act as the hazardous
waste. We designed the robot to have a rotoary storage system on the back
of it to storage each sphere indivually on the robot. We had a claw with a
IR sensor to detect the spheres and point at them as well as detect the
relative distance. We built the robot using tetrix aluminum channels for
the chassis along with tetrix DC motors and servos. We use a pie pan along
with a hand made six sloted fan to make the storage system. Artist rednering
below (sorry I don't have any pictures but this was a long time ago and I
lost them all)
Once we had built the robot it was time to program it to do our bidding.
We used labView to program the robot. We wrote an algorithm to move into
the center of the room, begin rotating to the left, if the IR signal got
weaker rotate the oposite way until the signal starts getting weaker.
Then the right wheel would move forward until the signal got weaker, then
it would alternate to the left wheel until sensor got to a thresh hold
that indicated the claw was in pickup range of the sphere. The robot would
then grab the sphere and place it in the storage unit. This process would
repeat until the IR sensor did not register an IR light bellow a thresh
hold and would then exit the room.
Uh oh this section about this persons work experience is a stub. As an employer you can help by expanding it.
During my the summer of my freshman year at college I got a job as a research
assistant at the University of Houston-Victoria. During this job I worked on
editing a couple of research paper about a background subtraction algorithms
writen by a previous researcher.
Heres the link to the first
Heres the link to the second
While working there I got a lot of experience using LaTex to write the paper
as well as some experience coding in C++ using the openCV libraries and using
C++ to collect and manupulate data. I also
got some experience messing around with the Unreal engine for another progect
the Universty was working on.