Hi, I'm Tanner.
I'm an engineer. I like taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and building things that work a little better.
About
I'm working on a master's in electrical engineering, and most of what I do lives at the seam between hardware and software: control, firmware, and the unglamorous work of making both survive contact with the real world. That intersection is the part I love. Right now it looks like flight control and embedded systems, and I'm all in on it. Part of what keeps the work exciting is that the same instincts carry from one hard problem to the next, so there's always another layer to get better at. Linux and C/C++ have been my home base for over ten years now, and I still reach for them first.
Engineering was in the background before any of it: I'm a second-generation electrical and computer engineer. I started working at 14: a year of landscaping, then three years of guttering for a boss I still measure other bosses against. From there it was population-health software at Oracle, autopilot work (AFCS) at Garmin, and where I am today almost a decade later, still drawn to the same seam: hardware and/or software meeting a genuinely hard problem.
I'm most interested in how things work, and I'll happily be bad at something new for a while if it means I get to find out. That curiosity doesn't stay in its lane. It's the same itch that got me a ham radio license, a Part 107 to fly drones, and a PADI card in case I ever want to see what's going on underwater.
I'm usually in the middle of building or supporting something, so downtime tends to be brief. When I do step away, it's normally to get outside for a bit: a trail, somewhere I haven't been yet, a little quiet. Then I come back and start the next thing.
Projects
Boards & embedded hardware
A.E.R.Ω.-X
My senior capstone. A full flight-control stack, hardware and software, that three of us designed and built over the year. See video
Custom single-board computer
A Raspberry Pi-class compute board designed from scratch. My own take on the whole board rather than building on someone else's.
PiGuardian
A home monitoring system with custom hardware and software, built from the ground up.
USB keystroke-injection device
A "rubber ducky"-style device I designed and built end to end, and a hands-on way into firmware, HID, and the security of peripherals we tend to trust by default.
Tools & software
Legit
Version control for legislation. It brings software's diff-and-history conventions to the text of government bills so changes are actually legible. See demo
Walden C++ core library
My own library of efficient, easy-to-use implementations of the common algorithms and capabilities I kept re-writing.
Multi-library repo generator
A tool that scaffolds and manages repos containing multiple sub-libraries, always buildable straight out of generation, with dependencies and link overhead trimmed wherever possible.
For the fun of it
Tactical trailer lighting control
Interior and exterior lighting for a tactical race support trailer, under a hard constraint: it had to stay RF-quiet so it wouldn't interfere with nearby radio gear. Clean, quiet power out, with full dimming still intact.
Kinetic sand table
A machine that three of us designed and built over the semester. It draws flowing patterns in sand. Configurable "gcode" style programming for design and leds. Quiet, hypnotic kinetic art.
Sonar digital theremin
A theremin played by waving your hands through ultrasonic distance sensing instead of touching anything. FreeRTOS backend group project.
Light-based alarm clock
A configurable clock that wakes you with light instead of noise... although it can play megalovania if desired. An end-of-semester group project.