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, and teaching those topics to high school students as the software/controls mentor of FIRST Robotics Competition team 3512.

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 root-locus geometry and 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 2020 controls features
• Geometry (Translation2d, Rotation2d, Pose2d)
• 2D trajectory generation and constraints
• Led development of state-space controls library
• Made APIs use higher order functions instead of inheritance for improved composability
• Wrote TrapezoidProfile, ProfiledPIDController, and LinearFilter

wpiformat

• 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