Nicholas George

I work as an Embedded Systems Engineer for the Wireless MAC team of Starlink.

As a Digital Hardware Engineer at Viasat, I was tasked with updating existing flight hardware to comply with new customer requirements. This required quickly analyzing and understanding existing framework and then make sensible changes. I was also tasked with finding ways to cut down the upload time for FPGA bit steam images to the flight FPGAs. Through independent research and collaboration with the team, I was able to cut down the time by about a factor of 10.

Alpha Cube Sat is a student run lab at Cornell University dedicated to designing a functional cube satellite to be sent sent in far off missions. I programmed the on board microcontroller to correctly package and send photographs taken with the onboard camera to the base station. I also was in involved in programming and testing the satellites capability of detecting payload deployment and orientation checks with the onboard accelerometer

I have Independently programed the embedded system for an autonomously navigating solar powered sailboat. The boat runs on a SAME70 microcontroller which I have designed with a RTOS controller for GPS navigation systems, actuators, sensors, radio, and satellite signals. There are plans to reproduce it as commercially viable product once prototyping and testing is complete

Our project team is developing a combination of a drone and a ground rover to detect plant disease in a crop field. The drone flies over the field and using a special infrared camera maps the field and watches the general health of the crops. The ground rover, based off of NASA's Curiosity Rover, inspects specific regions of the field and checks for signs of plant disease. The rover uses deep learning to identify and locate disease on crops. This project is mean for applications in Sub Saharan Africa in order to increase crop yields.

Our team is making a fully autonomous drone which will compete in the International Aerial Robotics Competition. It will have capabilities of detecting and avoiding obstacles using computer vision, going to checkpoints using GPS and manipulating objects while in flight. I was responsible for writing all the code to facilitate serial communication between a Raspberry Pi and a drone flight controller.

Developed Software to facilitate automatic regression testing of hardware when new features are added during hardware development. Designed and constructed client software to upload results of product requirement testing using Jama software.

I worked with Oceanographers and Software developers to create a dashboard to view geographical raster data stored in the USGS databases on the cloud. I was tasked with using two Open source scientific python repositories called Xarray and Panel to create such a dashboard. The goal was to test out these tools and see how easy it was for scientists or engineers to use these tools using basic python. I wrote the dashboard in Python in a jupyter notebook. The repository can be found at https://github.com/USGS-CMG/dem-dashboard