The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Embedded / microcontrollers

Erik Schluntz

erikschluntz.com

Engineer & Entrepreneur

Embedded / microcontrollersElectronicsSoftware / engineering practiceAI / ML

’15’20’25
Posts
38 from 1 Jan 2011 to 26 Oct 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://erikschluntz.com/feed.xml

2025 1

  1. Building a Quadruped Robot (with an airsoft gun)

2024 2

  1. Replacing my Right Hand with AI
  2. Designing Bridges with Pytorch Autograd

2023 2

  1. Lasercutting Projects
  2. Automating 1/2 of my typing with generated shortcuts

2022 1

  1. How To Raise Your First Seed Round

2021 4

  1. Refinance your Tech Debt
  2. Podcast: Taking Elevators, Robot Body Language, and Advice for Startups
  3. Premortems Will Keep Your Code Alive
  4. Writing High Stakes Code (At A Startup)

2015 7

  1. Path Planning with Trajectory Libraries Traditional path planning techniques such as RRT or A* do not do a good job expressing physical constraints like maximum acceleration or turning radius. Even if they are smoothed to find the shortest path, it might not be the quickest path.
  2. Adaptive Control for Damaged Drones Modern control techniques like LQR require an accurate model of the system they are controlling, but if that system changes changes you’re out of luck. I designed an adaptive controller to maintain control of a drone even if one of its propellers breaks. The algor
  3. On Demand Video Tutoring Alex Kaufman and I thought that arranging traditional tutoring was too slow to help students when they really need it – If you’re up late finishing a problem set or studying for an exam the next day, there’s no way to talk to a tutor in the moment. We built cs50pro as a way
  4. SpaceX Falcon 9 This summer I worked at SpaceX on the Flight Software Test Team. Ensuring software correctness is a challenging problem on a project as complex as a rocket, where so much performance depends directly on the hardware. Our team creates automated tests that leverage both simulations and
  5. Spectroscopy Instrument For a semester long design project, I worked on parts-per-trillion precision HCl detector that will fly on the Harvard / NASA “StratoCruiser”, a long endurance balloon that can move around the stratosphere to investigate Ozone loss. In order to attain our required precision w
  6. Robot Circuit Boards I spent much of senior year leading a redesign of Robot Soccer Team’s electronics for increased reliability, flexibility, and backwards communication. The robots have two way communication with a central computer over Xbee Radios, 3-phase brushless motor controllers that pull up
  7. IoT-enabled Bike Sharing For our CS244r final project we built a smart bike lock and an iPhone app that allowed users to rent out their own bike, or to rent other people’s bikes. Our server generated Time-expiring One Time Passwords (TOTP) that were passed to the phone, and then to the lock over BLE

2014 9

  1. Robot Soccer AI Working on the MIT / Harvard Robocup Soccer team was a fun and fast paced engineering experience. We compete at a world championship tournament every summer, and spend the school year working on new mechanical designs and new behavior algorithms to out-maneuver and outsmart the other
  2. Termite Tracking Computer Vision It took 60 hours of tedious labor annotating videos of termites every time the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard ran an experiment. Because of the experimental setup, off-the-shelf tracking software didn’t work. By using standard image processing tech
  3. High Performance C++ Using C++ I created a variety of physics simulations for a graduate class on Systems Development for Scientific Computing. I implemented an abstract graph class to represent my data, and applied it to several different problems including mass spring simulations, shallow water mo
  4. Robotic Drawing My final project for Advanced Robotics was to draw pictures from an input photo using a Catalyst-5 robot arm. Standard edge detection algorithms were just the beginning of my processing pipeline, the real challenge was to connect these edgelets into continuous pencil strokes for the
  5. CPU on FPGA As part of a class on computing hardware, I designed and implemented a multicycle MIPS RISC architecture CPU on a Xilinx FPGA using Verilog. I started by creating the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) that is the heart of any CPU using combinational logic. I then created the datapath and c
  6. Google[x] Smart Contact Lens This summer I’m working at Google[x] in the Smart Contact Lens group. The lens is designed measure glucose levels in tears and transmit information to your other devices. This will allow people with diabetes to continuously monitor their blood sugar levels throughout the
  7. Drones with RFID Sensors RFID tags are the perfect platform for sensors: cheap, small, and with an infinite lifetime because they harvest energy from RF signals when communicating. Their only problem is a very limited communication range. In this project with Travis Deyle and Jennifer Wang, we used
  8. Microcontroller As part of my Laboratory Electronics class, I built a microcontroller from scratch in order to see how computers work at the most basic level. The processor is connected to 32K of RAM as well as an ADC and DAC through a shared data bus and address bus. Because I implemented the logic
  9. Tech in the World Over January 2014 I traveled to Tanzania as part of the Tech in the World program to expose more CS students to international development. While there, we designed and built a system for the Ifakara Health Institute that would allow them to send Verbal Autopsy reports to and from p

2013 2

  1. Posmetrics (originally PollVaultr) Posmetrics (formerly PollVaultr) was my first startup! While at Harvard, Merrill Lutsky and I both realized that everywhere we went, businesses wanted us to fill out customer feedback surveys, but we never did because filling out surveys later and online was such a
  2. 2D Robot Simulation My goal with this program was to create an environment where I could accurately simulate a robotic system without any hardware. The most challenging part of robotics is overcoming the physical imperfections, noise, and unpredictability in the environment. I tried to mimic this as

2012 3

  1. Shock Absorber As the final project for my Mechanical Systems class, we had to design a shock absorber that would minimize the impact force of a 10lb weight dropped from 2 meters, as well as model the system as springs and dampers to predict the maximum force during the impact. In order to achieve t
  2. Cellphone Based Robot For my final project in Introduction to Electrical Engineering, my group created a robot that used an android handset as its processor. The robot was able to receive instructions through the cellphone’s data service and also stream back video from the phone’s camera. I chose to
  3. President's Challenge Aaron Cheng, Rob Gunzenhauser and I entered the 2012 Presidents Challenge at Harvard University and were chosen as 1 of the 10 finalist teams from over 170 applicants across all of Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate schools. Our proposal was to process sewage in slums across

2011 7

  1. Stirling Engine My applied physics freshman seminar focused on designing, modeling, and building a stirling engine. We learned the thermodynamics and operating principles behind the engine, and used them to model the theoretical efficiency of the engine based on a number of design parameters in Math
  2. Erosion Simulation I wrote this simulation while working with a professor at Harvard University doing research in computational geomorphology during my freshman year.
  3. Steam Engine For my high school senior project, I decided to build a steam engine. With only a drill press, a dremel, and a hacksaw, I built a crankshaft connecting a 45 lb flywheel to two pistons. I hand-sanded piston heads out of HDPE so that they were airtight with the aluminum piping I used to m
  4. Vex and First Robotics During high school, I was the lead mechanical engineer on my school’s robotics team. We competed in FIRST robotics and then the Vex Robotics Challenge, making it to the World Championships four years in a row.
  5. Unreal Gravity This program simulates how objects would orbit a central gravity well if the relationship between distance and force in Newton’s law of gravity is changed. Exponents other than -2 produce strange, but still stable orbits.
  6. Landscape Generation This program uses Perlin Noise to generate random landscapes and color them realistically. A number of parameters allow the user to tailor the scale and level of detail of the generated landscapes, and the program can produce surprisingly realistic results.
  7. Cellular Automata This program simulates Conway’s Game of Life, a well known rule for 2 dimensional Cellular Automata. Cellular Automata can produce incredibly complex patterns from extremely simple rules and interactions, and noted scientist Stephen Wolfram suggests that they can be used to model r