Projects & Papers
This page catalogs a number of things I've worked on.
Major Projects
Trane gave me the opportunity to do a number of open-ended R&D projects over the last couple of years. Here are some of the ones I can discuss!
Firmware Prototypes for EHM
The Controls and Diagnostics teams launched a New Product Development (NPD) initiative around collecting data with an aftermarket component from non-communicating ("dumb") 24V HVAC systems. I prototyped a complete two-box system with local communication over BLE, and a cellular Internet link, that transmitted actual sensor data to a server. Testing was done with Nordic hardware. Firmware was C and ZephyrRTOS.
LVGL UI Refresh
Trane's current premium thermostat uses an older GUI toolkit, and we generally agree that it underperforms in some areas. I was tasked with porting our core application to LVGL and demonstrating it on our production hardware. I rewrote the frontend code, swapped out FreeRTOS for ZephyrRTOS (which meant bringing up that operating system on our custom hardware), and built my way up to basic thermostat functionality.
This is probably the hardest thing I've ever done, but we achieved 80FPS on a small microcontroller, when the production app struggles to achieve 30.
Senior Design: Radio-Frequency Direction-Finding Drone:
For our capstone class, I convinced my teammates we should do something with a drone. We settled on autonomously homing on an emitter somewhere on the ground. This meant we had to write guidance logic, a digital signal processing pipeline, and build and test a Yagi-antenna-equipped drone. We achieved most of the project's goals, but final integration of hardware and software was a challenge with all three of us working ~30 hrs./wk. and we didn't fly by the end of the semester.
Research & Reports
Mosaics of San Marco in Venice
In Fall 2023, I had the pleasure of taking Dr. Elizabeth Lisot's Italian Renaissance Art History class as an upper-division elective. As a part of the class, we completed original research in a specific area. I chose Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice, which is a cultural treasure and fascinating historic record dating back to the 10th century.
In this paper, I had the opportunity to explore the impact of the Renaissance on the mosaics in the basilica, which is an interesting topic, because mosaics are usually seen as a medieval or Byzantine art form, and not as something a Renaissance master like Titian would be concerned with. In fact, the truth is very different!
My paper is attached here.
Foundations of Mathematics in Lean
In Fall 2025, I took Foundations of Mathematics and chose it as my Honors Trackwork course. The Honors College has us complete some additional project of our own design in the two semesters before our final year. I chose to do my first one under Dr. Debbie Koslover.
I asked to formalize some of the assignments from the course in Lean since I'd been playing around with it already, and I think the results are satisfactory. It starts with the basics and ends with a little induction problem. I wanted to do some stuff with uncountability, but ran out of time.
MATLAB Signal Processing
For my Honors Trackwork in Spring 2026, I chose Algorithms in Applied Mathematics. Dr. Stephen Graves taught us MATLAB and a number of applications, while I extended the class by completing the Signal Processing track in MathWork's learning platform, among others. I have a number of MATLAB certs now, as a result.