Hey There!
I'm Nathan Wignall, a first-year electrical engineering student at The University of Texas at Dallas. You can find me on GitHub or LinkedIn.
Why Electrical Engineering?
I've been intrigued by electronics and machines for as long as I remember. As a kid, I used to take any old electronics—cheap motorized toys, broken phones, old hard drives, or whatever else eight-year-old me could get my hands on—and break them open in the backyard. I would stare at the circuits inside, wondering, "how?" Nowadays, designing PCB circuits myself, I feel the same sense of wonder. Even the simplest technology is incredibly complex under the hood, and the closer you look, the more there is to discover. I'm constantly surprised by just how much there is to learn and how little I actually know, and strive to explore and learn as much as possible.
Other Hobbies
I have many hobbies outside of engineering and other nerd stuff. I'm a huge fan of music (124,000 minutes on my last Spotify wrapped), enjoy cooking for myself and my family, and love to read. In addition to these, my favorite hobbies are more artistic: writing and photography. Both of these allow me to express myself creatively and create something outside the world of tech. I also love blending my technical and artistic skills, having a particular interest in creative image processing, where I put my programming skills to use making interesting and novel filters and effects to apply to the photos I take.
Power Distribution Board
PCB board I've made as a part of the RoboSub UTD GalaxSea electrical team. This board takes a 14.4V input and feeds it out to a Jetson Orin NX and lidar sensor. It also uses an on-board 14.4V to 12V buck converter to deliver power to ten seperate JST connectors where various other systems and components can be powered.
A1 Andromeda
The A1 Andromeda is a sumo robot control board, and was my first real attempt at a PCB. It takes 12V input from a battery, and uses an on-board LDO regulator to step it down to 5V, which then powers the microcontroller and sensors. The board also features two 12V brushed motor drivers to control the robot's movement.
Dohyo
Dohyo is a work-in-progress 2D sumo robot simulator written in C. Inspired by Bot2D, the goal is to create a cross-platform simulator realistic and versatile enough for code written for the simulator to be able to be used on a physical robot with minimal changes.
Club Attendance Tracker
Website made using SvelteKit and Node.js to help track member attendance for RoboSub UTD. The website presents a log-in screen to user where they swipe their university ID card through a reader, parsing the information and validating their identity. In the case that the member has not signed in through the system before, a screen is presented prompting them to insert their full name, public university ID, and any projects within the club that they are involved in, which is inserted into a database. Upon future swipes, it automatically validates the information on their university ID card against the information in the database, counting them present with a simple card swipe.
RoboSub UTD
Secretary
As secretary, I'm in charge of club organization and management, which I created a member attendance tracker to aid with. I'm also an electrical team member for GalaxSea, our RoboBoat team, where I design and troubleshoot PCBs and electrical systems for the boat. In addition to all this, I often take photos for club events that I attend.
Comet Robotics
Member
Mainly involved in the SumoBots project, where I design sumo robot control boards for use in internal competitions. When I have time, I also help develop Dohyo, a sumo robot simulation suite (although it's mostly on hiatus at the moment).