hi, adi here. welcome to my little space on the internet. I’m glad you came. a quick bio about me:
— currently or have recently been a: student, designer, engineer, cyclist, hitchhiker, pedagogist, & electronic musician.
— graduated from The Olin College of Engineering in May of 2023.
— currently get paid to work on a fast-paced team of *good humans* to design circuits, debug R&D photovoltaic systems, and learn Silicon Valley corporate engineering practices at Lunar Energy, a (residential) distributed clean energy & storage hardware startup of about 300 in the SF Bay area.
— live in a co-living of 7 wonderful humans in the Mission, in San Francisco.
— interested in learning more about: science (climate/climate change, optics, wave physics, matsci, neuro), anthropology, networks, house music, statistics, acoustics, & the art of communication.
— would love to chat, grab a beer, or go on a hike. i can be reached at lego.r.ramachandran@gmail.com.
cool things I’ve performed, explored, or built:
a journey on two wheels through a world designed and centered around automobiles, featuring kind strangers, mediocre michigan road infrastructure, all across the corn-filled terrain of the American midwest.
in a holistic exercise in graphic design, interviewing, pedagogical study, & data viz/synthesis, I made a graphic and told a story of the pedagogical paradigm of impact centered education within olin college, and laid out a vision and next steps for Olin as they move to adopt this style of course into their strategic roadmap.
an exploration into electronics for audio: designed and implemented a 25W/ch class D audio amplifier with a GaN power stage, featuring an analog volume adjustment & EQ circuit. schematic, calculations, & board files, can be found here.
our senior entrepreneurship capstone project at olin: a thorough dive and market analysis into the electric grid, from a ‘climate tech perspective’. See full presentation here.
performing some of my own groovy house & acid tracks live on my drum machine, the Maschine Mikro Mk3, for NoiseBridge Makerspace’s monthly electronic music open mic. Skip to 1:18:18, & listen with headphones!
some older projects below.
Smart Ring Wearable PCB - low power, 12x20mm footprint
In STEP, an insane experimental course that Olin offered in spring ‘22, we designed and validated a complete embedded system to be used in a two finger smart ring. The ring’s accelerometer would transmit gestures over bluetooth to allow for screen free control of a user’s smartphone, which is particularly relevant to the blind and visually impaired community (blog post coming soon!).
The hardware itself was straightforward, designed around the STM32WB55xx uC with a 6 axis LSM6DSOxx acceleromter/gyro, a 2.4Ghz BLE chip antenna, and a BQ297xx single cell battery protection IC. Designing within such a small footprint and with the power consumption constraints of a wearable was quite exciting. See Github page for board files.
Check out our autonomous maze solving differential drive robot!
We built a robot to complete the MicroMouse Competition! Our custom differential drive bot autonomously navigates and solves a 16x16 maze, returns to its starting point by generating a path from its understanding of the maze, and pathplans an optimized route for a final thrilling speedrun to the center. Check out our Github to learn more! Project features ROS, Gazebo, and Python, with graph theory, path planning, and high speed robot motion control.
Olin Electric Motorsports (Formula SAE Electric)
OEM is our Olin’s Formula SAE team that works to build an electric racecar every year!
Testing Subteam Lead
I previously led the Testing Subteam where I managed and architected projects like our Hardware in the Loop system, our Battery Management System testing rig, and more!
Low Voltage battery management system
I designed & validated the battery management system for our car’s LV bus featuring a bidirectional load switch in the high current path, voltage, current, and temperature sense for the 4s6p pack, & passive cell balancing! The PCB is designed around the LTC6810 ASIC - I also configured the custom battery pack! Check out the github for more info.
Vehicle telemetry software
During my second year on OEM, I wrote firmware for and built the data pipeline behind our team’s new telemetry system, to live-stream sensor data from the vehicle’s CAN bus for visualization, logging, and analysis on the sidelines. Check out the design review slides for more info.
Corewars
We rebuilt Corewars and used it to teach computer science students in India! (We also reached the front page of Hacker News!)
This is one of my favorite projects, and getting to actually deploy it to a university in India in January 2020 was incredible. You can see the final product above! Read more about our work at our full blog post!
Flywheel & Motor Controller Design!
We simulated, designed, & built a 9kg flywheel capable of storing .74Wh of energy. I worked with another student on the design of a 400W 60V inverter for the BLDC motor. See the project site to learn more!
We built a particle filter!
We wrote some code to help our cleaning robot locate itself in a known physical map using the in built LIDAR sensor and some math. Check out the blog post to learn more!
Power Electronics at Olin
Power Electronics is one of my favorite courses at Olin - we learn the theory of different power conversion architectures - buck, buck boost, flyback - and build up our own printed circuit boards to test and understand behavior of those architectures in the real world!
I’ve also worked on a bunch of other projects, including …
- Attending the 2016 White House Science Fair for a project on basement flooding.
- Building a single cycle CPU (capable of running Assembly) in behavioral Verilog.
- 3D Modeling, CFD simulating, constructing & testing a feather articulating RC ornithopter!
- co-founding and running a successful college essay writing workshop
- winning an MIT COVID-19 hackathon
- Leading Assembly on my high school robotics FRC team!
See my github or read my blog for more, below.