Matt Ruffner
Engineer :: Maker :: Artist
Photography
The panorama above was taken at Crater Lake in South West Oregon, and the background of this page is the ultimate glam shot of a nice 30 piece stellated icosahedron.Below are a few of my favorite photos taken. Predominant locations are Glacier Ntnl. Park in Montana, the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, and the Biltmore House Greenhouse Gardens in North Carolina.
Origami
I enjoy making modular origami using Sonobe units and have even gone so far as to write a program that generates the layout to print on pages so that your input images piece back together on the surface of the assembled work. In 2018, some very big and very small 30 unit pieces were assembled. Below is a selection of the 30 unit modules and one cube printed with the aforementioned image slicing script.
WoodWorking
In 2022 I began making mandolins and have made 5 so far.
Electrical Engineering
Kentucky Re-Entry Probe Experiment (KREPE)In collaboration with the mechanical engineering department at the university, I have gotten a chance to build avionics hardware for three re-entry probes. The goal of KREPE was to provide a means to evaluate and characterize thermal protective materials used on spacecraft. Two of the three probes successfully survived breakup and re-entry of NG-16 and transmitted back heating profile data.
AR/VR Machine Vision Camera for Augmented RealityThis was the research for my Masters thesis, which focused mainly on PCB layout and schematic design to support a very stable power delivery network and two HDMI ports.
MojoV3 Machine Vision Camera Control ShieldProvides interfaces to two Basler USB3 Cameras as well as an I2C controllable programmable oscillator for providing specific HDMI pixel clock rates.Schematics/Board files linked below on GitHub
WiFi RelayThis was a fun little project that came to be out of needing a way to control an LED backlight from software. It is an ESP8266 controlled in-line relay controllable over local WiFi via Qt C++ object.
Measure MeshA final project for and IoT Systems class, this Node/Gateway/Web Interface project utilized LoRa radios in a Adafruit Feather form factor to log data to an SQL database running on an Ubuntu box.
The Kentucky Organization of Robotics and Automation (KORA)KORA is a student led robotics club at the University of Kentucky that was started in 2018. Since then, e successfully built and competed with our robot at the NASA Robotic Mining Competition in May 2019. The club email, website and GitHub links are below!
