Projects

Project One

Project One was my first deep dive into learning everything there was to know about the project I was working on, then building it from the ground up. I sourced the materials, 4130 ChromeMoly steel from an aircraft supplier. Learned about welding, heat treating and finishing techniques. With Failures came improvements. Gussets added, etc. Later designs came and failed. 20 years later, one is still a pile of Tubes in a box, which was the cumulation of all I learned. Stay posted, and one day I may post "Project five".

Chaos Box

Chaos box was our Bachlors Capstone project. I had found Adafruits website just before starting at ITT and stumbled upon her Wave Bubble project, an open source project she created for her Capstone. My concept was to expand on it. I Doubled the bands from two to four. I also wanted it to do more than just throw out noise, I realized by controling the frequency, instead of just sweeping the spectrum, I'd have a FM transmitter as well. I added an input so that a micraphone or other source could be addded easily. What was more was with control, one could even do frequency hoping. Quickly it was realized this could be a tool for students, a RF jammer for use by businesses (legal issues aside) and military as an anti-IMP bomb tool.

Starting with Adafruits original work, I started cutting and tweaking the layout. I quickly came to the conclusion that I would have to start nearly fresh since so much was going to change. I removed nearly all of the original drawing, and begain the process of laying out the parts I was going to use. It also became apperent that I would need to recalculate antenna lenths as well as power requirements. After checking the layout for completion, We sent it off to a board house to have it etched, and ordered the parts. The whole board and the hundreds of parts had to be hand soldered. I chose to superglue the parts down first, hoping to use a make shift solder bath. It became evendent that this would not work, so I moved to hand soldering every single surface mount item. Due to time restraints, the code could not be completed for the mircocontroler. Instead a make shift daughterboard was soldered in to allow for simple operation to demo the noise generator function.

The final product, a working Noise generator. We could see peaks on the FFT scope in the bands we planned for and were able to cause a few phones in close vacinity to loose their cellular signal.