Nathan Cheek

This week I purchased a 2015 MacBook Pro. After it arrived yesterday, I opened it up to check the internal components. The heatsink stood out; it was obvious too much thermal paste had been applied. I’ve never seen this much thermal paste on a Mac before, so I assume it was done by a careless third party.

I was specifically concerned that the extra paste could flake off over time and short out components in the laptop. With this in mind, I removed the thermal paste and applied a much more modest amount.

Ever since creating my original LED Matrix, I knew there were ways to make it better. The most obvious upgrade was to fit it on a printed circuit board, but my work on this PCB design stalled as I was busy with other things. In Summer 2018 I began working on this project again, finishing the design and manufacturing a few boards as a proof of concept.

RapidHarness is a software solution for designing and documenting wiring harness. My team was looking to start using a better wiring harness documentation system than the EAGLE schematics we used in the past, so we decided to try RapidHarness (disclosure: they provided us a free professional subscription for educational use).

While using RapidHarness over a few months to document several harness designs for my team, I had a chance to play with a number of its features. I was fairly happy with the resulting design printouts, but along the way I found a number of problems, mostly things that slowed me down as I tried to use the software. I would recommend that anyone interested in this software compare alternatives before settling on it.

Building on our 2018 success, HyTech Racing has once again won first place in Formula Hybrid’s international electric vehicle competition. Wrapping up my second and final year as Team President, I was excited to see the hard work of our team pay off with excellent results in all static and dynamic competition events.

With a weight of 368 lb, our vehicle was the lightest at the competition. This light and high-performing vehicle design was made possible through the team’s iterative design process that we have focused on developing over the past 3 years.

We’ve had a bit of media coverage:

• Georgia Tech Article
• Dartmouth Article
• Georgia Tech Video

This spring semester I worked with a friend to build an updated Raspberry Pi Zero CAN Shield for our ECE4180 final class project. Building off of my CAN Shield project from last summer, we were able to fit a standard DB9 connector onto the board without compromising the board dimensions. We wanted to add this connector since it is a common standard for CAN Bus connectivity, and by using a smaller CAN controller chip package as well as removing a duplicate connector, we were able to make it happen. More information about this project can be found in our writeup here.