This September, Parallax has been in business for 35 years. As part of our celebration, we asked our customers to tell us your Parallax story. This is one we received from our community which will be shared throughout the month.
My journey with Parallax began when my dad brought home the classic “What’s a Microcontroller” kit when I was in middle school. I had never programmed before and my experience with electronics was next to nonexistent. I don’t remember much from the book at this point except that as I worked through the examples, I realized I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t get very far before getting overwhelmed. So, I stopped working on it. Fortunately, that didn’t last.
I picked it back up in early high school because I wanted to make a speed readout for paintball guns. It led me down the rabbit hole of learning electronics, programming, PCB design, and how to write code for the BASIC Stamp. From there, I was hooked on what I could do.
Shortly after this, I discovered Propeller. I began learning spin and making all sorts of random projects—I learned how to drive displays, get mouse and keyboard input, work with sensors, servos—you name it. I was in a technology program called TSA, the Technology Student Association, where I competed in an animatronics challenge. I used my new skills with Propeller to make a walking animatronic spider. It had ultrasonic sensors for navigation, hydraulics driven by DC motors to actuate the legs and a custom PCB for all the electronics. It won 1st place at the national competition in 2011.
The following year, I entered the competition again, this time with a robotic hand that would mimic the basic hand gestures of someone wearing a wireless glove controller. The glove used ultrasonic microphones in each fingertip and a speaker at the wrist to determine the approximate position of each finger. I only placed somewhere in the top 10 that year—I suspect the judges didn’t believe me when I told them I had etched multiple PCBs in my kitchen to make all this work, especially when almost all other entries were some form of a VEX robotics kit. I didn’t compete the year after, as I had moved onto a much more exciting project.
During my junior year of high school, I discovered 3D printing. I thought it was a really cool technology and I wanted my own, for projects just like the animatronics competition. After seeing the kinds of quality FDM printers produced at the time, my father and I knew we could do better. So we co-founded a company that today is called Carbon. At Carbon, I developed the early printer prototypes and designed the system architecture for the printers. All the motion control and light output timing was done using Propeller. While Propeller never made it into Carbon’s production printers, it is still used by Carbon’s R&D team today.
As Carbon grew, I went off to study electrical engineering at Cornell University. There, I joined a project team called CUAir, a student team building autonomous search and rescue aircraft. My first project on CUAir was to build a camera gimbal that would fly on the plane to point the onboard camera. Of course, I turned to Propeller. However, I wanted to add a new challenge and do it in C. So I began learning PropGCC. The gimbal had two brushless motors and an IMU to measure orientation. I also began working on a Propeller-based autopilot as a side project, but as I became the electrical lead and eventually full-team lead, I didn’t have time to finish it.
After graduating from Cornell, I joined SpaceX as an avionics systems and integration engineer, where I worked on a wide variety of projects, including ground and test equipment. Once again, I turned to Propeller for any project requiring a microcontroller. One project I worked on was a satellite deploy device simulator. It would simulate the electrical load presented rocket when deploying a satellite, be it a 10A pyro, or a 100mA optoisolator LED. Essentially, this box was used to verify that the rocket was built correctly and could deploy a payload successfully once in space. It was ethernet connected, so it would transmit live data back to a server where we could record and analyze the results of tests. We built about 100 of these and sent them to various work centers to be used as part of the launch integration and checkout process.
A second interesting Propeller project I had at SpaceX was a ventilator controller. During the height of the pandemic, SpaceX was still launching and landing rockets, which means there were crews out on boats during these launches. The launch teams wanted to have a portable, battery-powered emergency ventilator in case someone developed really bad COVID symptoms and needed it until they could get a helicopter back to shore. I designed the electronics and the Propeller was at the heart of it, driving the actuator for the pump and the UI. Fortunately (as far as I know), it has never been needed in the field.
About a year ago, I left SpaceX to co-found Airhart Aeronautics with one of my best friends from college. At Airhart, we are making airplanes that anyone can fly. The core design of the avionics and control systems in the plane relies on having several microcontrollers: to control motors and read sensors. For this, we aim to use P2. My work on p2llvm serves as the foundation for this, as it offers a fully featured C++ toolchain so that we can write testable and highly reliable code. If successful, this will likely be the first use of P2 in a safety-critical application, which would be super exciting for me personally as a long-time fan of Propeller and Parallax.
Thanks,
Nikita
