Sam Haggans

At Northeastern, I have been very involved with the avionics group of the AerospaceNU student organization. Avionics is responsible for developing electronics, PCBs, and software for flight control boards (FCBs, pictured right), data acquisition boards, and other software and hardware tools to help control and record data from our rocket launches. Our FCBs have GPS, radio for live telemetry, multiple flight data logging, and support a wider range of parachute deployment conditions than other commercially available products.

As a part of Project Redshift, our eventual goal is to launch a rocket with a liquid engine to around 20,000 feet. To build up to this goal, we frequently launch solid motor powered rockets to test various rocket subsystems. We have had multiple successful FCB-controlled and continue to test and improve our software and hardware systems.

In 2023 I became the avionics project lead, which has been a great opportunity to contribute more to the organization and take a role in directing how we use our resources and communicating with other groups in AerospaceNU to work most efficiently.

AerospaceNU Website

For EECE 2140 Computing Fundamentals for Engineers at Northeastern, I developed a GUI maze generation and solving program called Snaking Mazes. This GUI, written in Python using PyQT, provides basic maze creation, editing, and solving functionalities, and also supports sharing mazes to other users of the program. This project was very interesting because it provided me with experience in both GUI creation and algorithms like A* that can be used to efficiently solve mazes and other similar problems.

GitHub Repository

As an intern at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in high school, I developed a sea ice animation tool to animate sea ice extent and concentration data. This tool allowed for a visual understanding of how sea ice has changed over time on the scale of days, months, and years. This tool was developed in JavaScript/HTML/CSS and used OpenLayers to render the map view.

Project on NSIDC Website
GitHub Repository

For our Cornerstone of Engineering final project, my group and I developed a 3D printed and laser-cut device to capture the energy of rainwater falling through gutters and turn it into electricity. We developed this system using a variety of CAD tools, including SolidWorks and AutoCAD. Additionally, we used an Arduino on a custom sensor breadboard to measure the energy output of our system and display this information on an LCD. This project was then accepted for publication at the 2022 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition.

ASEE Publication

As part of CS3650 Computer Systems at Northeastern, I developed a mini shell that modeled basic Bash functionality, including command piping, I/O redirection and command substitution. This shell was written in C and gave me a lot of experience with Linux syscalls and general interfaces.

This is a Newton fractal renderer for the TI-84 Plus CE family of calculators. It allows a generator polynomial to be selected by the user and then generates the resulting fractal image. This project was primarily to gain experience working with the TI-84 C development toolchain but was also interesting due to the inherent beauty of the fractals it generated.

In high school, I was a co-leader for the student organization that ran the school's website. This website was built using Ruby on Rails and provided functionality for announcements, student organization pages, staff pages, and a classroom functionality.

Also in high school, as the public relations officer for Fairview's chapter of National Honor Society, I developed a new projects website using ExpressJS. This website provided an ordered and sortable listing of all current volunteer projects with contact and sign up information.