Alvaro islas

Welcome

Thank you for dropping by. I love to learn and experiment on my own.

About me

bienvenido!

Hello! My name is Alvaro Islas and I am an "always learning" Electrical Engineer who likes to learn by doing. Feel free to look around and if you want to connect with me feel free to either use the email icon or the reply icon on the page.

NASA

NCAS 2023 Mission 3
Cypress College NCAS
CSULB CubeSat Comms
CSULB CubeSat Team

NASA Mission	Job	Website	Year
N.C.A.S. (NASA Community College Scholars)	Operations Engineer	NCAS	2023
NASA CubeSat at California State University, Long Beach	Communications Engineer	CSULB CubeSat Acceptance 2024	2024

NASA has ignited my passion for space exploration. Initially lost in my STEM pursuits, I found direction through participation in N.C.A.S. (NASA Community College Scholars) in early 2023. Receiving an acceptance was unexpected, but it thrust me to prove myself. This journey primed in reaching the final mission and collaborating with an exceptional team and mentor, resulting in successfully accomplishing and winning, however our true prize in the end was a confirmation that NASA has a place for us all.This experience propelled me to join aerospace clubs upon transferring to California State University, Long Beach in Fall 2023. In my first semester, our club ambitiously aimed to launch the campus's first cube satellite. In less than four months, we conducted trade studies and crafted a proposal for NASA's CubeSat initiative. On April 3rd, 2024, we received the thrilling news of our selection.Overall, I am profoundly grateful for the opportunities afforded by NASA. It has unlocked unforeseen avenues and instilled in me a drive to pursue even greater feats—all stemming from that welcome letter from N.C.A.S. Huston, we are a go for take off.

FPGA

Troubleshooting

I started working on FPGA for thermal and AI tracking, however, the FPGA is timing out on the USB connection whenever I try to upload the code. The FPGA board is the Butterstick by Greg Daill and the orange board is called the Tigard Protocol Tool. It's an open-source FT2232H-based, multi-protocol, and multi-voltage tool. I'm going to use the Tigard board to bypass the USB connection and update the bootloader.

Keyboard

Corne 5-column

This split keyboard is from typeractive.xyz is a good kit to understand how to build and customize the keyboard layout. The board uses a nice!nano v2 which runs nicely on the ZMK Firmware.

Some Builds

The pictures show builds that I have done in the past. The one on the left is a prop I made that included some Inductive LEDs from Adafruit. On the right is a DIY Amplifier from DIYRE.

Inductive Wireless LED
Microphone Amplifier

Light up Armor

work in progress

This project is growing and changing every year. This originally started as a simple piece to add towards my ren-fair outfit. But, I figure I could do better. So I combined some parts from Adafruit (Magnetic Connector, Adafruit Feather M4 Express, and Adafruit NeoPXL8)

M4 Express
NeoPXL8
All assembled

Using Arduino IDE I am able to use some of Adafruit's existing code to suit my needs.

Design

CAD

Designing with CAD programs is a new feat I've decided to take. I started to build a guided rail from parts of my 3d printed that were replaced. I am making use of the wheels, and hardware and designing the pieces I don't have. That led towards designing my own mounts for my personal projects viewed in the gallery.

Gallery

Machine Learning

Linear Modeling

Python is a useful and easy language to learn machine learning. With the combination of Matplotlib, Keras, Numpy, and other libraries I'm working on autonomous driving simulation.