Hi I'm Tom! I'm 20 years old and I'm a third year engineering student from North Vancouver, Canada.
One of my favourite things to do in my free time is to take on engineering projects to solve problems, or to help answer questions I have about the world around me. Occasionally these projects grow into something that I'm proud of enough to share and the goal of this website is to do just that.
As part of pursuing this passion for engineering I am currently studying Engineering Physics at the University of British Columbia. I really enjoy this program because it's more theory heavy than most engineering programs, while still being very hands on. I find taking a more rigerous approach to topics and making sure I fully understand them really helps me get a better intuition as to what's going on, rather than just relying on formulas and look-up tables. I also really like all the material Engineering Physics covers and lately I find that I've been becomming particularly interested in electronics and optics specifically: really anything wave related.
Aside from engineering, I quite enjoy music and I have a band with some friends that I play drums for. We have concerts every few months at a venue in North Vancouver. I also like swimming, photography, and spending time outdoors. Hope you enjoy the rest of the website!
Part of the UBC Engineering Physics robotics competition involved a task where robots were to identify and retrieve a 3D printed "rock" containing aluminum foil that was visually identical to several other rocks on the course. To do this I designed a metal detector which could achieve ranges upwards of 20cm.
In the summer after their third year, UBC Engineering Physics students compete in an anual competition in teams of four to build a fully autonomous robot. Recently being one of these students, I participated a Mars habitat themed competition, doing a lot of our electrical design.
I personally play drums not guitar, but I find the signal processing in guitar pedals quite interesting, so I decided to try and make a guitar pedal for my friends. As this was the first moderately complicated PCB I designed I initially started this project mainly with the aim of figuring out KiCad, but I ended up quite enjoying learning about the electronic filters involved.
In summer of 2025 I designed a driver circuit for a xenon flash lamp. It used a 1.41mF capacitor bank that could be charged to 410V in 150ms using a transformer that I wound. It also had a high voltage trigger circuit that I designed to be controlled with low voltage pulses from a Raspberry Pi.
To make a strobe light for concerts for the band that I play drums for I wrote a program in Rust to trigger the xenon flash lamp when I hit the bass drum. The program utalized a technique known as "onset detection" to analyze audio input in real time and look for a sharp increase in low frequencies. The program was run on a Raspberry Pi.
In late 2023 I wrote a Fourier transform algorithm from scratch in Python which I used to analyze 5 years worth of tidal data from waterfront station in Vancouver. The Fourier transform was used to detect several interesting frequencies which could be attributed to motion of nearby celestial bodies.
In my first year at UBC (2024-2025), as part of UBC Formula Electric I designed a 38cm by 42cm IP67 rated silicone gasket to seal the inverter from water and dust. This gasket was made from a two part silicone which was cast into a 3d printed mold.
During the summer of 2024 I wrote a computer program in C++ to simulate games of poker in order to calculate the chances of winning a hand with given hole cards (the two cards that you hold) and a given number of opponents. It simulated over 1 million random games for each possible set of hole cards and the data collected was visualized using a heat map.
Throughout the years 2020 to 2023 one of my friends and I built many solid rocket motors using components available from the hardware store. This involved making the chemicals required such as potassium perchlorate and aluminum powder. We tested potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, potassium perchlorate, and double base based propellants, eventually achieving altitudes upwards of 100m.
I've been interested in photography since late 2019. I've got a Nikon D3200 with 18-55mm f3.5-5.6, 55mm f1.8, and 55-300mm f4.5-5.6 lenses. I also have a Canon AE-1 with a 50-85mm f3.5 lens. I mostly like taking nature photos and experimenting with various camera settings to get interesting effects.
