PROJECTS

Cooling Those Who Can't is an ongoing community service effort aimed at preventing exertional heat illness in para-athletes. Paraplegic indiviuals have an impaired ability to regulate their body temperature, which predisposes them to heat illnesses and thereby heat strokes, which can be fatal. To mitigate this risk, I built a "cooling zone," which was a shaded area fitted with a motion-sensitive misting system and powerful fan. Many of the supplies for this project were donated to me by local Home Depots. In the summer of 2024, I took this "cooling zone" to the Desert Challenge Games, an international para-athletic event hosted annually in Tempe, Arizona. At the event, the project ran for ~16 hours over the course of 2 days of competition in 106 degree (F) weather. In that time, over 200 people from 12 different countries used the cooling zone, and users had only positive things to say about it. The event organizers were exceedingly grateful, and asked me to set it up again the next year. I hope to continue running this effort year after year to ensure the safety of the global para-athletic community. You can learn more about my research regarding heat illness in para-athletes here.

Originally built for a club booth at a school event, this cannon was my first ever physical engineering project (and also the sickest so far). It originally used a bike pump to pressurize an air chamber, connected to a barrel by a solenoid valve, but after recent upgrades, it now has an air compressor port for easier (albeit louder) loading. It fires foam ball projectiles and boasts a 280psi pressurization limit, though I've never pressurized it above 50psi for safety reasons. It can shoot the foam ball projectiles about 50m with 50psi. I plan to use this in the future to wage war on my enemies.

In the Spring of 2025, this project had new life breathed into it. With the help of several friends from school, the cannon was transformed into a functioning tank that I could sit inside of. We didn't quite have the budget to add a motor and steering, but having a second person push worked just fine. My math teacher liked cows a lot, so we painted cow print on it. After it was revamped in this way, we crusaded around campus, conquering whatever classroom we saw fit. We even used it to retrieve a confiscated tricycle from the front office (don't ask how that happened). The principal may or may not have been shot by the cannon (he was fine). Good times.

Tiko is a Discord bot that (among other things) allows users to interact with a Minecraft server. The bot and server are both hosted on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB). Users can issue commands to start the server and query server information. Administrators can issue many more commands, with capabilities including stopping the Minecraft server, editing the server MOTD, manipulating the world file, viewing logs, accessing the Linux shell, and more. Tiko also has some basic Discord server moderation features such as warning, kicking, and purging. Tiko has been my longest-running project; it began in the summer of 2022 and I continue to maintain and improve it to this day.