Howdy! I am Daren Swasey. I graduated in May 2023 with a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in Controls and Signal Processing from Utah State University. In 2021 at the beginning of my professional program, I held a job as an undergraduate researcher in signal processing under Dr. Todd Moon. In that research I used MATLAB for designing and testing algorithms. I used Python and C++ for implementing the algorithms in custom GNU Radio blocks. Since August of 2022 until my graduation, I worked with Dr. Greg Droge as a research assistant. I learned to develop components of the ROS2 framework for a simulation environment that was utilized for testing UAV path planning under uncertainty. I became more familiar with real-time programming practices and utilized C++ and Python.

I have been coding since my middle-school years, dabbling in C# briefly before moving on to C++ in high-school. Since then, I have grown to learn Python, Java, C, MATLAB, Assembly, VHDL, Verilog, and some Bash scripting. I have a few years of experience with Linux and Git as well, rounding off some good software development skills that I have learned over the years in my EE degree and from the classes I took in my Computer Science minor. Way before then, my experiences as a member of a FIRST Robotics programming team and what I learned from playing with LEGO Mindstorms set really showed me the potential of what can be done with code and hardware combined. I have been coding and learning how to code better ever since.

I would like to showcase a few things I have done over the years. There's a lot of stuff I have done with my skills in electrical engineering and coding. Use the header links below to check them out!

A small collection of things I have done in school and/or personally.

This is a page regarding my most recent research experience with Dr. Greg Droge at Utah State University during the last year of my graduate program. I had a lot of fun learning to use ROS2 and making fun tools in ROS as well as in Python, C++ and even bash on occasion. I learned a fair bit about making merge requests during my time here too. The focus of the research I was supporting was UAV path planning under uncertainty.

In March of 2021, I began work with Dr. Todd K. Moon, a professor at USU who teaches primarily signal processing classes. At the time, I was tasked with developing an indoor "burglar alarm" that utilized radio signals and software-defined radios (SDRs). After a grueling process of study, research, testing, failing, testing, progress, and more testing, I was able to come up with several algorithms for intrusion detection. These algorithms ran in the GNU Radio environment in sort of a pseudo-real-time fashion, and the results were actually quite surprising in a positive way.

For an internship in the summer of 2022 at Rincon Research, I had the opportunity to learn how to develop a real-time system with the GNU Radio ecosystem. I worked alongside five other interns that had experience in signal processing, machine-learning, web-development, and Linux administration. In part of my work, I developed a method of synchronizing incoming data from 2 USRP B210 radios linked to separate computers. I utilized the ZMQ library in Python with a TCP protocol for message transmission between computers on the same network. A server-side desktop received the data from both radios and fed it through a neural network to get predictions about the location of a radio transmitter. These prediction outputs were then stored in JSON files and sent to a web client that would display the data. The goal for the system was to operate at around 5 Hz in real-time and I was able to achieve that design goal.