Hi my name is John, but in online communication I prefer the alias Vaktaeru – there’s a long story behind that name so I won’t type it all out here, but feel free to ask about it. I like cats and music and I love talking to people about just pretty much anything. My hobbies include playing video games (especially league of legends), playing guitar, swimming, basketball, and employing social media to provide psychological “first aid” to depressed or suicidal teens that have trouble reaching out to find help on their own.

As far as being an engineer, my specialties are robotic design, creative redesign of existing systems, software programming (primarily C variants and HTML), and aerospace design.

If anyone has any questions, or simply wants to talk to me about anything at all, feel free to contact me – I like to think of myself as a fairly outgoing person.

Final Milestone: The Maglev Tower

My project was technically

Second Milestone: Building The Device

For my second milestone, I had to give the levitation device some sort of structure, as it is in fact a device and not just a ball of wires on a circuitboard. I opted for a tower-like design, putting my magnets facing downward in alignment with an upward-facing distance sensor that is directly attached to my circuitboard.

Here is the video for the second milestone of my project:

First Milestone: Controlling The Magnets

For the first milestone of my project, I had to complete three connected goals:

First, I had to wire my electromagnets into my circuitboard and get them to turn off and on with my program.

Then, I had to wire my distance sensor into the circuitboard and write a program that printed readings from the sensor into a serial viewing monitor (basically a number-by-number visual printout of the inputs the sensor was getting).

Finally, I had to integrate the program controlling the distance sensor into the other program that controlled the magnets, so that as long as the distance sensor was getting a reading within a certain range (between about 15 and 45 centimeters), the magnets would turn on, along with a yellow indicator LED.

Here is the video for my first milestone project:

Starter Project: The Universal Off-Button

The starter project I chose was the “TV-B-Gone” device, which I immediately nicknamed “The Universal Off-Button”. It uses an infrared signal to take control of the nearest television (or other remote-controlled device) and tell it to immediately shut down. It employs the use of a small capacitor, five transistors (four of which are used to respectively control four infrared diodes), an indicator LED, several small resistors, and of course, a microcontroller. In doing this project, I learned how to solder and ‘clean’ components for the purpose of attaching them to a circuit board, as well as the basics of controlling power routes via transistors and resistors. As it is my first project, I’m very proud to have done it, and I look forward to completing more small projects like this independently in the future.

Here is the link to my video on the project: