Alonso's Space

ESP32 Garage Door Controller

Alonso — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:08:36 +0000

Summary The goal for this project was to be able to control the garage door to my home remotely with a mobile device in an easy manner, so that I would not have to carry the home key or main garage remote around with me when leaving the house. I decided to do this by …

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Chronograph

Alonso — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 20:11:00 +0000

In this project, I wanted to make a device to accurately measure the velocity of a projectile. The approach I took was to use two pairs of infrared LEDs and phototransistors, with each pair facing each other, spaced a fixed distance apart, along with a microcontroller (Teensy 3.2), to determine the time it takes for …

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Coilgun

Alonso — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Goal Last semester, for the Fall of 2022, I started to investigate ways to learn more about electronics and design, so I decided to build a coilgun. A coilgun uses several stages of sequentially activated coils to launch ferromagnetic projectiles in a particular direction. Specifically, it generates a gradient in the magnetic field strength …

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Ampere’s Force Law Experiment

Alonso — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 20:13:00 +0000

I built this quick experiment in my senior year of high school to test Ampere’s force law. It was inspired by a diagram in the physics textbook I used. Powered by a lithium-polymer battery, the circuit involves running current through a resistor (pencil lead) and safety fuse and then through the two U loops of …

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Lithophane Fabrication with 3D printer

Alonso — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 20:09:00 +0000

Lithophanes are very cool physical images made by varying thicknesses in a mostly opaque material and shining light through it. I made some simply by using a 3D printer and ItsLitho.com, a site that converts any image into a 3D stl file to print. I also added a custom light switch to some to illuminate …

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Caliburn Fabrication

Alonso — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 23:49:00 +0000

One of my coolest projects was fabricating a 3D-printed Nerf blaster with some metal components I bought online. This design is the Caliburn-U, designed by CaptainSlug. I did all the 3D printing and attached it to the metal parts. It is very powerful and the darts average 220 feet per second muzzle velocity. It is …

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