I am an aspiring systems engineer/software developer who has a vested interest in fluid dynamics and projectile physics.
More about me
I believe in open-source software and hardware as it provides the basis to further society as a whole. This includes both free and paid entities as I also believe developers and engineers should have the option to provide paid services through their open-source creations (e.g., projects may be free as in source code, but not free as in beer). As such, I plan on placing significant efforts on creating different open-source software, firmware, and hardware throughout different fields to help provide the basis to spread this philosophy so everyone can benefit as a whole.
As a first initiative acting upon my philosophy, I plan on developing the first open-source synchronizer device (also known as a digital pulse generator) for the purposes of fluid flow diagnostics. This primarily targets particle image velocimetry (PIV), an approximately instantaneous and indirect optical technique for measuring fluids, which is primarily dominated by very expensive commercial software and hardware. Although there has been recent efforts to lower the burdening costs of obtaining a PIV system, there has yet to be a complete open-source PIV system which could further reduce costs-of-ownership to a more manageable level. This is where I hope my efforts would provide some serious value to this community and further the open-source community as a whole.
OpenPIV is the organization that first introduced me to fluid dynamics. OpenPIV provides open-source software to perform digital PIV analysis on already aquired images. As such, I plan to eventually extend OpenPIV to include both software and hardware components to create a complete open-source PIV solution!