Hello, my name is Logan Miller. I'm currently finishing up my senior year at Grand Canyon University where I've been pursuing a Bachelors of Science in Software Development with a minor in Cyber Security.
I grew up in Flagstaff Arizona around the outdoors where I did a lot of hiking, dirt-biking, ice skating, and competed in FIRST robotics FLL & FRC. My family is in the construction and mining industry which led me to grow up doing very hands-on labor for work as a teenager. I did a lot of construction on apartment remodels and worked at the volcanic mine managing the flow of trucks being loaded and dropping off products in the yard. I grew up with the mindset of working hard and playing hard. I signed my first W-2 when I was 10 (as it's allowed when working for a family business) and began with cleaning and organizing. During winter breaks, I spent a lot of time up on the ski slopes enjoying Flagstaff's snow.
When I got into middle school, I got interested in FIRST Lego League (FLL) which is a robotics competition where teams of middle schoolers are tasked with a modern day problem to solve and create a product for and also a game board where LEGO's Ev3 Mindstorm robots are programmed to autonomously navigate a fielded and complete numerous tasks. This was my first taste of programming and engineering: familiarizing myself with different components and sensors that are used in the automation industry. After competing in FLL for 4 years, I continued to mentor the team as I went into high school and started competing in FIRST Robotic Competition (FRC) which is FIRST's higher-level robotics competition. FRC was when I got my first taste of "real" programming. At the time, I started learning Java as it was the main language used for programming LabView's RoboRIO robotics control unit (for more information on this, see the side notes for the FRC robotics code). Learning to program in Java really changed the way that I viewed the world. It let me think of creative new ways to solve my every-day problems. I started making applications in my free time to do everything from sending my self text message reminders to helping me calculate tedious math problems in my statistics math class. Working with an industrial control unit such as the RoboRIO also taught me a ton about how industrial components are used to get things done on a larger level. We used everything from imaging and object recognition, to LiDar sensors, to gyroscopes and magnetometers to manage the robot's autonomous and tele-operated game phases. FRC also taught me a lot about hardware, mechanical, and electrical design. As the materials used in FRC are relatively open to experimentation we modeled the entire robot in SolidWorks before manufacturing it using CNC machines and 3D printing making sure to run stress-simulations to ensure that we had the optimum strength-to-weight ration possible. With 150lbs aluminum machines launching objects at 50MPH and running around at ~20MPH it was important to ensure the safety of both the team and the robot. Learning from an early start to make redundant, reusable, and reliable code has helped me tremendously throughout my programming journey as it has now become second nature.
FIRST LEGO League introduces science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to children ages 4-16* through fun, exciting hands-on learning. Participants gain real-world problem-solving experiences through a guided, global robotics program, helping today’s students and teachers build a better future together.
Our three divisions inspire youth to experiment and grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills through hands-on STEM learning and robotics.
Under strict rules and limited time and resources, teams of high school students are challenged to build industrial-size robots to play a difficult field game in alliance with other teams, while also fundraising to meet their goals, designing a team “brand,” and advancing respect and appreciation for STEM within the local community.
FIRST Robotics Competition Home PageFRC 2020 is the robot code that is flashed onto the RoboRIO for the FRC competition. The robot needed the capabilities of accurate and high-speed turret maneuverability independant of the drive shaft, reliable cargo-loading with auto anti-jamming redundencies, and high-speed manuverability for on-ground performance.
FRC 2020 GitHub ProjectI've been programming, coding, scripting, whatever you want to call it for coming up on 12 years now. I started when I was around 10 years old when I was first introduced to the Ev3 programming "language" until I moved to Java and C# during high school. I messed around with a few different languages: Python, Swift, JavaScript, Ruby, R, and a few others, but it wasn't until my freshman year of college where I really got into using C.
I knew that I wanted to go into aerospace programming since about junior year of high school, and once I learned that almost all low-level / high-speed computing is done in C I sat down and started some hands-on projects.
Before that however, I was still mainly focusing on Java throughout high school and made some applications that to this day I'm pretty proud of. First up, Project: Genesis...
Project: Genesis
During my first couple of years in FRC, scouting the competition was a large part of team strategy. Knowing what and when your opponents did something was vital to how we played the game. With me being a part of a small team, people got very worn out when having to sit and watch the same robots compete for 10 hours each day, and even with that we would still miss some important information which later made it very difficult to extract a strategy from. This is why I knew we needed a way to automate the process; the only problem was that there was no easily obtainable data on how each robot performed, only data about the entire match itself (which is made-up of 6 robots--3 on each team). At the time, I was reading a textbook on Deep Neural Networks, and it gave me an idea.. Although the cloud data from the field only contained data on all of the robot's collaborative effort and not the individual robots themselves, there is still some information that can be abstracted from looking at the trends of each teams matches. This idea was the foundation of the Genesis project which later became a cloud-based application that could be texted to get real-time data on any robot in the world, not just at the local competition. This gave us the edge that we needed as we had the collective intelligence gained from every match a robot has ever played in at the tip of our fingers. This creation also helped me earn the FIRST Dean's List award which is awarded to only two students from each competition (about 1/1000) and sent me and my team to Huston for the world championships.
Performance Car Lighting
PCL, or "Performance Car Lighting" was my "side-project" during the quarantine of spring of 2020. My parents had me start saving all of the money I earned from working since I was 10 so that once I could drive I would be able to purchase a car, and that I did. My first car was a 2015 Subaru Impreza with a manual transmission. Although not the most sporty car, I knew that with a little automation I could add features that no one else had in their car, so I started working. I started by looking into the OBDII (On-Board Diagnostics) unit which is responsible for communication error codes and engine stats to mechanics working on the car. I found out that with the right communication protocol, you can get everything from air-intake temperatures, to air-intake manifold pressure, to oil temperatures, to (most excitingly) engine RPMs. I worked extensively to setup a communication protocol between a Raspberry Pi and a ELM32 OBDII diagnostics unit so that they could wirelessly communicate. After a LOT of trial and error, I finally got a prototype working that could read the RPMs from the engine and display the value in a remote terminal session. This was great, but I wanted more. With help from my dad, we took out all of the plastics and seating in my car and ran wires through the whole thing that connected 9 RGB LED strips to a central control unit installed out of sight. With the whole thing wired and the car put back together, I now have a fully functioning set of under-glow LEDs that reacts to the RPMs of my engine in real-time. This made late-night drives in a manual transmission much more enjoyable as I could see the faint glow fade colors as I down-shifted on my drive home.
LUX Longboard Automation
Freshman year of college I had way too much time on my hands, so I needed a project to keep me busy. I had an electric longboard that I used to get around campus, but sometimes at night it was a little hard for other people to see, so I figured it would be a great idea to put some under-glow on it! Taking some inspiration from my car project, I got to work, although this time I didn't have much room, so using a Raspberry Pi was out of the question. Luckily for me, Atmel makes some AtTiny85 microcontrollers that would be perfect for this project. I ordered a few off of DigiKey and got straight to work. I didn't want just regular lighting, no, I needed to be "special" so I ordered an accelerometer from Amazon and used the left and right leaning (used to steer a longboard) to make the two RGB LED strips react to my riding. It was a pretty long process as it was also my first time soldering onto a prototype board instead of just using a breadboard but eventually I got it done and now had the most reactive lighting on campus. No problems seeing at night again!
Mine C2
Unlike a lot of my other projects I've talked about so far, Mine C2 is a bit different. Instead of starting as something that I wanted to create, I was faced with a problem that a mining company in northern Arizona wanted to hire me to solve. The basic premise was that one of their legacy machines needed continuous monitoring otherwise they risked overflowing one of their feeder belts and causing thousands of dollars of damage in down-time. With my background in embedded systems from working a few years at some other jobs (and my personal projects) I immediately started going to work. This is one of my more "professional" projects that's not under any non-discloser agreements, so I decided to dedicate a larger section of my website to it. The link can be found in the side-notes.
Project: Peregrine
This project is currently a work-in-progress but is my GCU senior capstone project and is meant to demonstrate the best of my engineering abilities. Because of this, I have also dedicated a separate section of my website to show it off.
A Deep-Neural-Network used to predict the performance of robots in FIRST's FRC
Project: GenesisPerformance Car Lighting was a side-project that lead to a real-time reactive-lighting system that would give a driver feedback on multiple engine points of data (but the RPMs were the most fun)
Performance Car LightingUsing the ATTiny85 microcontroller from Atmel, I programmed an electric longboard to use an accelerometer to dynamically adjust under-glow RGB LED strips.
LUX Longboard AutomationFRC 2020 is the robot code that is flashed onto the RoboRIO for the FRC competition. The robot needed the capabilities of accurate and high-speed turret maneuverability independant of the drive shaft, reliable cargo-loading with auto anti-jamming redundencies, and high-speed manuverability for on-ground performance.
FRC 2020 GitHub ProjectMine C2 is a project for a company that hired me to do some industrial automation for them. Located in northern Arizona, a volcanic surface mine had some legacy machines that they needed to be automated to reduce overall downtime and damages to equipment.
Mine C2Project: Peregrine is my GCU senior capstone project meant to push my limits and demonstrate what I am truly capable of. The basic premise is a autonomous UAV that utilizes thrust-vector-control to encapsulate a high-level of maneuverability and take advantage of the stabilization that it provides when taking off vertically without a runway.
Project: Peregrine When I was younger, I remember my dad bringing me to an airshow in Florida. At the time I didn't understand much about how planes worked or how computers were used to control those systems, but I remember being in aw as I saw the Blue Angels flying overhead. After watching an amazing performance, we walked around to look at all of the aircrafts at the show and I distinctly remember the Airforce section. With a matt grey finish, and sharp corners, every aircraft looked like it had a purpose-- like it was made for something bigger than any individual component. That moment sparked something in me, it made me think of how I wanted to be apart of something bigger, something that had an impact, and definitely something that had to do with avionics.
Later in life as I went through middle school and high school, I went through the phase that many boys do; I saw all of the military / action movies and thought "how cool would it be to be apart of that action!" and later on not only a part of an action, but to have an impact that so many that serve do. For a while I thought "what if I join some part of the military or DoD?", I could help protect the people I love and do something that has a real measurable impact on the world. As I thought about it more and more though, I realized I wouldn't be doing as much as I could be. I was gifted with the ability to program and work with automation, and if I could use that somehow, I felt like I could help more people. That's when I started to seriously look into what goes into things like rockets, jets, missiles, radars, and a whole lot of other things that on the very surface seem like they're just a bunch of fuel and a little computer but when looked at closer contain so much more. I realized that I wanted to help people in the greatest way possible using the skills that I've obtained over the years and that I could do that through one of the most exiting things imaginable: programming things that fly. As I continue on my journey of learning and self-improvement, one undeniable quality that those who know me well can affirm is my relentless determination to contribute to the advancement of aviation, shaping a brighter future through flight.