I completed this project at roughly 14 and it was my claim to fame for a while after. I had been exposed to rotary phones during one of Maine’s very common power outages, since our cordless phones didn’t work through a power cut. The three components of the phone were an Arduino Pro Micro, which interpreted dial/hook voltages, and coordinated calls an Adafruit Fona 2G, an amazing board that is basically a Nokia 3310 on a breakout board. It broke out speaker/mic pins, and had a serial interface. It’s sadly been discontinued with the phase-out of 2G, and nothing VoLTE has really replaced it. a Sparkfun WAV trigger, for playing the ringer sound effects. It is basically a board that will play short audio effects when a pin is triggered. This project originally used schematics from an ancient Sparkfun to generate a voltage to use an actual ringer (this project has been done a few times by other folks. Convergent evolution will get you every time). However, my electrics skills/equipment were woefully unprepared, and I kept burning out H-bridge chips. The WAV trigger connected to some salvaged laptop speakers did the trick.

I was president of the Marshwood High School Science Club from 2015 to 2019. This may sound impressive, but it was more of an excuse to reserve a room after school for me and my nerdy friends to hang out in on afternoons that we didn’t have math team practice. Our one club responsibility however, was management of the Marshwood Weather Station. A few administrations before us, the science club had purchased and installed a Davis Vantage Vue weather station, and got it installed on the roof.

Tyler Technologies in Maine sponsors an annual event called the Maine App Challange. Brian Austin, Noble Mushtak, and I participated in the challenged in 2017 and 2018. Our initial app was called Permit Log, and it was our most successful, winning first place and having over 2000 active users. Google Play Store listingMaine has the strictest teen driving laws in the country, requiring 70 hours of logged driving on a lerner’s permit before gaining a license. I have no idea why this is. I constantly forgot to update my paper log, so it typical digital transformation fashion, we made an app. The UI was pretty simple, with just a start/stop button that allowed you to record the properties of the drive, and export it at the end.