About
I recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an undergraduate degree in astrophysics. I enjoy solving problems, building new ideas, and working on anything that brightens people's days, and often use my experience in software development to create new and novel utilities for use with desktop flight simulators. When not tinkering with software, I like to take pictures, fly airplanes, and occasionally write.
Projects
SimBridge
Created a proof of concept to connect Amazon Echo devices to Microsoft Flight Simulator X, enabling users to control the simulator hands-free by using voice commands. This project uses a combination of C# on the desktop, an MQTT server, and an AWS Lambda function written in Python.
SimParticipate
Created a utility that allows audience members viewing a Twitch stream of Microsoft Flight Simulator X to interact with and control the simulator. This enables new possibilities in user interaction, such as the ability for the viewers to remotely fail aspects of the aircraft, or cooperatively perform tasks such as tuning the radio.
FSX Blue Angels Hornet Flight Control System
Designed a simulated fly-by-wire flight control system in C++ in collaboration with a virtual aerobatics team to add new functionality to a third party addon aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator X. This enhances the flight handling characteristics, allowing users to control the simulated aircraft in a manner more consistent with the real aircraft.
EFB Connect
Created an open source utility to share simulated position, attitude, and traffic information from Microsoft Flight Simulator X with electronic flight bag (EFB) apps such as ForeFlight over local area networks. This uses the SimConnect API to interface with the simulator and implements the ForeFlight Network GPS protocol to communicate with EFB apps.
Aviation Weather
Collaborated on creating an open source, modern C++ library to parse coded aviation weather data structures. Project involved utilizing C++11 functionality, regular expressions to parse METAR strings, and Git for version control. Created both unit and integration tests (based on meteorological reference material) to validate parser correctness.
FS Active Fires
Created a utility that utilizes publicly available, near real-time remote sensing data acquired from the MODIS instrument aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites to visualize active fires in Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The utility was nominated for a community website's yearly freeware award as best freeware tool of 2014.
Writing
Urban Agriculture in Cities of Tomorrow
A paper highlighting the origins of Walt Disney's original plans for EPCOT (as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) and its intersection with urban agriculture, with a look at how the spirit of futurism and agriculture lives on in today's Epcot as part of the Living with the Land attraction.
Mosaic
A treatment, script, and shot list for a three minute screenplay where an apathetic teenager gets transported to an over-the-top world of fiction where he's forced to take action.
The Word Count
A short, single scene play set in a fictious NaNoWriMo police department, featuring a confrontation between a hardened detective and a flippant participant over a falsified word count.
Of Gods and Time Lords
A literary analysis comparing the titular gods from Marie Phillips's Gods Behaving Badly to the character of the Doctor from the BBC television series Doctor Who.