Nuclear Engineering · Texas A&M
Howdy!
I'm Aman.
I'm an undergraduate at Texas A&M trying to understand the world in every sense of the word "nuclear", from first principles, one instrument at a time. Based in College Station, Texas.
What I'm building
Everything I build is to better see and characterize the world around me.
The control software for TAMUTRAP's pulsed timing chain: it turns high-level pulse descriptions into PulseBlaster hardware instructions so the trap catches ions at exactly the right microsecond. One pure-Python core drives both an operator GUI and a headless EPICS IOC, and every mode runs with or without the hardware present.
The control system I built for LSTAR, the Cyclotron Institute's isobar separator. Computes multipole electrode voltages and drives a high-voltage crate over SNMP to clean the ion beam to M/ΔM ≥ 3000. It feeds TAMUTRAP, the beta-decay experiment I work on.
Alongside those, a few smaller things I'm tinkering with:
Building a hall-effect magnetometer from first principles. Biot-Savart derivation, vector math, beautiful 3D field mapping.
Mapping the resonant modes of a semi-hollow electric guitar body. Helmholtz resonance, Chladni patterns, wave equation on a bounded domain.
Real-time OBDII data acquisition with ESP32. Sensor fusion via Kalman filtering to estimate road grade from indirect measurements.
Most of my projects are really just an excuse to close the gap between theory and measurement a little. Attacking that discrepancy is where I seem to learn the most!
Ground-up construction, from circuits to housing. I like to understand the instruments themselves as much as the data they give me.
Write out every step. No hand-waving. I want to understand why the math works, not just that it does.
Almost every measurement rhymes with another one somewhere. Half the fun is finding where a guitar body and a harmonic oscillator turn out to be the same problem.