Matthew Carvajal

WAR CARD GAME

This was a solo project that I decided to take on as a massive learning experience. I wanted to know what it was like to build an app that I can install on my own device. We all have phones, but no one ever realizes how much work goes into their favorite apps. Using Swift and SwiftUI, I built this static iOS application that represents the classic card game 'War'. It is you against the computer, whoever pulls the highest card, gets a point. I love this because the game does on forever as it is one of my favorite ways to pass time. Feel free to check out the pictures below!

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FIRE FIGHTING ROBOT

This was a group project that involved us to use our creativity to create an autonomous robot. We decided to use an Arduino Uno R3 and C++ to create an autonomous fire fighting robot that uses infrared sensors to detect heat to then navigate to and spray water to put out the fire. This project took about 2 months to complete and it turned out to be one of the coolest projects to date! Feel free to check out the photos below.

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DIGITAL RANGE FINDER PCB

This solo project involved designing a compact, accurate distance measuring device using ultrasonic sensors and a fully custom PCB paired with 2, fully custom 3.3V and 5V regulators. Using a MSP430 microcontroller, I built, prototyped, and fabricated one of my favorite projects to date. I was also introduced to the reflow oven soldering process to carefully place the components onto the custom PCB.

Below, you will see all of the schematics drawn in Autodesk EAGLE that were sent to JLCPCB for fabrication. During the fabrication process, I then tested and programmed a MSP430 development board with my code to make sure by time I got the PCB back from fabrication, all I had to do was upload the code to my PCB. Overall, this was a massive learning experience that took almost 3 months of design, testing and debugging for this project to work as intended. Feel free to check out the schematics and pictures of the fabrication process below!

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CONTACT MANAGER WEBSITE

This was a group project that involved the making of a contact manager web application using a LAMP stack. This is a tech stack that includes Linux, Apache, MARIADB, and PHP. Using these technologies, we created a contact manager that utilized the CRUD operations (create, remove, update and delete) to manage their contacts. Our website was hosted using AWS Lightsail where I used the integrated Linux terminal to establish a GitHub connection with a repository so we all can organize our work. This project lasted about 2 months and it was a massive learning experience since most of us have never done something like this before. Feel free to check out the UI below and if you want, the code for the project is in my GitHub at the top of my website.

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PERSONAL GAMING PCS

Over the years, I have built, maintained and tested several gaming PCs and personal computers. It has always been a passion of mine to take apart computers to understand the components, processes and overall functionality of a complex system. In one of the pictures below, you will see that I took apart an NVIDIA GTX 1080 because it had some overheating issues. I managed to clean it and put new thermal pads inside to get the operating temperature down from 190F to about 150F under load. I have also optimized systems with a benchmarking tool seen below called Heaven Benchmark in order to see how well the system is perfoming. Overall, I love the joy of putting such a complex system together, testing it, and using it to play games, do work, etc. Feel free to check out some of the systems that I have built over the years!

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