My name is Tyler Veness. I'm a graduate from University of California,
Santa Cruz with a bachelor's degree in Robotics Engineering. My hobbies
include software engineering, controls engineering, teaching those topics
to high school students in the FIRST Robotics Competition.
Projects
Most of my free time is devoted to writing software for robotic
applications. This includes contributing to WPILib and writing a book on
modern control theory.
A portfolio of my projects is available on GitHub.
Controls Engineering in FRC
- A practical guide to state-space control intended for high school
students
- Covers fundamentals of state-space control, LQR, and Kalman filter
design
- The latest PDF is available here
WPILib
- A C++ and Java library used by about 3000 high school FIRST Robotics
Competition teams
- Helped modernize C++/Java code base and APIs (JDK 8,
C++11/14/17)
- Managed community contributions of WPILib controls features
- Led development of
state-space controls library
- Made APIs use higher order functions instead of inheritance for
improved composability
- Wrote
TrapezoidProfile,
ProfiledPIDController, and
LinearFilter
- Maintained style guide for WPILib projects and wrote wpiformat
Python module to automate conformance
- Used Google's cpplint.py, clang-format, and custom checks and
transformations
Banana Piano
- Used analog input pins and pull-up resistors for using any object as
keys for a piano; human was ground
- State of pins was sent to client application via serial over
USB
- Used Arduino instead of Makey Makey (the inspiration), then ported to
BeagleBone with Python
Hackintosh-cxx
- Program for cracking lower alphanumeric passwords hashed with MD5
using computers in parallel
- Wrote benchmark for testing performance improvements; used
profiler
- Learned importance of data ordering in cache lines for
performance-critical applications
3dCapClient
- Showed location of the user's hand in three dimensions using three
large orthogonal capacitor plates
- Learned serial port over USB communication with Arduino and 3D OpenGL
rendering