Filip Jander

Accordion is an interesting solitaire game which is quite difficult to win as a human even though almost every deal is winnable. I built a solver that plays 6 million games per second which found to my knowledge the first randomly dealt unsolvable accordion solitaire deal. This ground breaking research shows that a little under 1 in a billion deals are unwinnable. 

This was a fun project I made after building the infinity table and being happy with the results. In this project, I learned how to design a PCB and got a little bit more experience with electronics, Arduino programming, and Fusion 360. By putting 12 reflective acrylic pentagons in a dodecahedron shape sticking 420 LEDs inside I made the infinity effect shown in the pictures. 

I designed and built this awesome Catan  board with hexes that light up wirelessly using an inductive coil. While I learned a lot using Altium and doing hand calcs to determine the sizing of the hexes and coil, this project turned into more of an art project when I spent 25+ hours designing the patterns on the hexes. 

This project started a while ago when I found out 100w LEDs are as cheap as $2 each on eBay . I finally finished the project up this summer when I got sent back home from college due to coronavirus. The flashlight consists of 8 100w LEDs and reused batteries from the electric hydrofoil project . 

In this project I tried to make a " bloom " similar to the ones created by John Edmark. I used Matlab to generate the files which I post process in Fusion 360. This project was somewhat successful, I was able to get the zeotrope effect in some areas of my model but other parts looked like a flickering blur. 

Through May 2022 to May 2023 I was the Chief Engineer of RIT's Formula SAE team. Managing the 80 person team was by far the biggest leadership role I've ever had in my life and I found it to be very valuable for my personal development as an engineer. 

As part of the Finite Elements grad class at RIT I wrote finite element solver and used it to analyze the pressure distribution on a plate with a thing fluid film under it. This project was especially interesting because the solver worked directly off differential equations for the thin film, so a cfd simulation in ansys would not be anywhere close to as accurate without a huge number of elements and complexity.  Pressure distribution over the rigid, oddly shaped plate pushing on a thin film   The report for this project is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1weJ6BIvdVOSqEhE3k7nNX-rH0ABxvAfRUZdo0ZrNjuc/edit?usp=drivesdk Another interesting project we did was using a thermal model in Ansys Mechanical APDL to solve a beam in torsion. This project exploits dynamic similarly: the fact that thermal conduction has the same differential equation as the stress output of a beam in torsion means we can solve a 2d torsion cross section by creating a thermal model in Ansys. This can...

I was the electric powertrain lead on RIT's FSAE team this year and part of my job was designing the battery pack for our electric race car. The hardest part of this design was the tradeoffs between different cells, mechanical constraints, and electrical constraints. Luckily myself and the other people on the electric powertrain team learned a lot from our previous batter back designs and we were able to make some major improvements to this design.

Do you ever wonder if you rotate more right or more left on average every day? Me too! My vibe coded watch app says I'm a clockwise guy, but recent scientific research suggest most people have a counterclockwise tendency. 

In this project, I made a programmable "infinity mirror" coffee table for my parents with almost 600 individually programmable LEDs. This project greatly expanded my knowledge of Arduino programming and the limitations of using Arduinos for similar projects. The final product turned out amazing, I was really happy with the results and even managed to make the table wifi controlled using the open-source WLED mobile app.

I was lucky to be given an opportunity to print a trinket on a PBF 3d printer. After some brainstorming, I settled on a spiral staircase lighthouse surrounded by waves inside a decorative egg shape that balances on its end like a roly-poly toy. The modeling for this part took a long time and I'm pretty proud of it; I estimate it took ~30 hours total between brainstorming, sketching ideas, writing scripts, fighting Fusion 360, and file prepping for the 3d printer. 

This was a small weekend project, it's basically a 28x28 Conway's game of Life's with torus borders. I learned a lot of cool little Excel features such as the iterative calculator when doing this project.

Sues vide is a method of slow cooking that involved putting meat in vacuum sealed bags in precisely temperature controlled water to ensure a perfect internal temperature. Fortunately, a 3d printer heated bed offers very accurate temperature control and zip lock bags can work in a pinch.

In this project, I designed and integrated a PCB for our FSAE car which safely discharges the high voltage capacitors in our inverter from 360V to <60V, controls the TSAL (large high voltage indicator light), and creates safe high voltage measuring points. This project was a really great experience because I got to learn Altium and get a much understanding of circuit board design.

I recently created a hype video for my FSAE team for our 30th year and wanted to share the process! In total, I probably put 30-40 hours into the video, a good chunk of that was scanning polaroids of old cars and digging through the old server for pictures.

I achieved what is to my knowledge the highest score ever achieved in the video game Faster Than Light. Is it still a record if I set up an autoclicker and used a hacking program to speed the game up? Reddit is on the fence . 

This is a quick puzzle I designed, the pieces are meant to be printed out and folded along the dashed lines. Assemble the 25 pieces into a QR code to get a link to the second puzzle! A printable version can be found here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cjQLQGQQtY_WgxTaXtpqP5QyN_t3FBI8/view?usp=sharing  

In this project, I used a microwave transformer and ~2200 volts to generate awesome lightning patterns in wood known as  Lichtenberg figures . The commercially sold 3d Lichtenberg figures in acrylic blocks require a particle accelerator, but a much simpler figure can be made using high voltages across wet pieces of wood.

I got inspired to do this project after watching some youtube videos . It's basically a 2 dimensional Ruben's Tube . Propane is pumped into a chamber with speakers in it and sound pressure from music opens or closes thousands of little holes. The result is a 2d array of tiny fires that dance to music.

This year I was tasked with designing the cooling system for F28, one of my FSAE team's first electric racecars. This is by far one of my largest projects; it took ~3 months not including manufacturing and testing. I researched designs other teams use, wrote a cooling simulation to determine radiator sizing, modeled the cooling system, worked with my teammates to integrate it into the rest of the car, and presented my designs to the team in preliminary and critical design reviews. I learned a lot about heat transfer, fluid mechanics, MATLAB, Creo, GD&T, and working in a team environment when doing this project.

A while ago I took a fractals and chaos course. One of the fractals we learned about was the Mandelbrot Set and its respective Julia Sets. The Julia Sets have some interesting properties which make them very easy to 3D print. I made a MATLAB program that generates Julia Set fractals and exports a 3D printable stl file based equations describing a path through the Mandelbrot Set.

This was a small FSAE project I did towards the end of the design season. The goal was to make a small lightweight shelf to hold most of the electronics in the back of the car. I learned a lot about designing carbon fiber parts as well as the material's limitations. 

In this project, I used ANSYS to design and analyze a lightweight motor controller mount. I learned how to use ANSYS Structural and greatly expanded my knowledge of finite element analysis. I also learned how to use the Creo sheet metal tool, and learned GD&T guidelines for sheet metal parts. The last major thing I learned was structural analysis of bolts, including bolt shear, shear tearout, bearing stress, and torque spec.

 I recently purchased the world's darkest paint,  Musou Black , and wanted to share my results. 

In this project I designed and 3D printed the cover for our dashboard on my FSAE team's electric racecar. I tested press-fitting different colored 3D prints into each other to make our logo and was pretty happy with the results. 

I recently purchased some Wood PLA and made a few small projects with it. Wood PLA is like regular PLA 3D printer filament, except around 30% of it is made of wood particles. This results in a slightly weaker plastic that looks and smells somewhat like wood. I modeled new versions of the trains from the popular board game colt express , 3D printed them to replace the cardboard trains that came with the game and painted the wood PLA with gel stain to make it look more like real wood.

This was an R&D project I worked on to further my FSAE team's development toward building an AWD electric racecar. The goal is to cool a 20kw electric motor as efficiently as possible in a robust and lightweight design. This project was really interesting because I got to use CFD for the first time. I learned a lot about fluid flow and thermal design, and the nuances of using CFD.

For one of my mechanical engineering courses at RIT, I programmed a simulation of a double compound pendulum. I used the Lagrangian approach which was a nice dynamics refresher. I did the majority of the math and programming between 10pm and 4am one night but it took a few more days to figure out some of the bugs in the MATLAB code.

One of my hobbies is making puzzles which aligns perfectly with one of my other hobbies, 3D printing. I recently messed around with Burrtools , a software used to generate specific types of puzzles known as burr puzzles. Some of these puzzles take dozens or even hundreds of moves to complete. In this post I go into detail on a few of the unique puzzles I designed.

This was a project I took on after watching 3Blue1Brown's video series on neural networks. I programmed a neural network entirely from scratch in MATLAB which was ultimately 38% successful at recognizing handwritten digits. For me, with less than a year of real programming experience, this was a huge accomplishment. I've moved on to other projects, but looking back I learned more from this project than any one of the other programming projects I've done. When I started this project, I didn't even know how to open and import files in MATLAB, and by the time I was done I had a basic understanding of how neural networks work.

As a new member on RIT's Formula SAE team, I've been doing a lot of manufacturing. Recently I learned how to use Mastercam  to generate and export gcode to our shop's Prototrak CNC mills. This has a few advantages over programming paths using the mill interface; the main one is not needing to type in specific coordinates for everything. So far I've primarily used the CNC lathes so it was nice to learn how to program the mills as well.  Lightweight fuel tank flange I CNC milled

This was a project I worked in MECE 104 - Engineering Design Tools. In this project groups of 4 built chime machines with at least 6 notes to play a song of their choice. I was the programmer for my group and got a good introduction to Arduino programming and motor control. Final chime machine We chose to play  Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver because it only required 6 notes and the beat wasn't super fast. At the end of the project, all 32 groups voted on the best chime machines. Our machine was one of the 6 selected to play at the Imagine RIT event in the fall. 

The electric hydrofoil surfboard is by far my biggest 3D printing project. I got the idea off a forum  I found and decided to make an electric hydrofoil surfboard for WISE. WISE is an English class for seniors at my high school where you have a regular English class for the first half of the year, and a large personal project for the second half of the year. One of the engineers from my robotics team agreed to be my mentor for the project.

This was a fun project I did during the beginning of my capstone PLTW course in high school. We were given one roll of duct tape by the teacher and had to build a boat to get across the school pool. We were also allowed small 3D printed parts.  The boat my partner and I designed worked well, we were one of the two boats that made it across the pool out of the 10 boats in the class. 

 These are two math puzzles I designed, figure out the digits to crack the code!

This was a project I worked on with a robotics mentor who's into board games. I designed and 3D printed the pieces but never got around to fully playtesting the game and finalizing the rulebook. I learned the basics of gear design and improved my 3D printing skills during this project. In total, I used almost 2 rolls of PLA filament to print all the pieces.