Liberty University
Nathan graduated from Liberty University in May of 2015 with a degree in electrical engineering and a minor in computer science. While there, he co-founded the Liberty University Robotics Club. He worked to get the club funded by the university, and loved helping the club grow.
Undoubtedly, the highlight of his time at LU was spending time with the club, engineering students and faculty, working on projects and learning together.
Thank you to the many students and professors who have met with us, written, and called sharing stories and memories of Nathan.
Capstone Project (Senior Project)
(Written by one of the four seniors on the project team.)
“For our project, we teamed up with the Lynchburg Fire Department to design and develop a device that would not only track a firefighter inside of a building, but would also show us whether or not he was standing or laying down, what floor level he was on, what direction he was facing, and what the temperature was inside of his suit. This device could be placed inside of the firefighters pocket or strapped to the firefighter himself. There were little communication modules inside each of the devices that would send info back to a set of homemade directional antennas that were mounted on top of the firefighters SUV which would face the burning building. There was a computer program that a firefighter could run from his SUV that would show a graphical user face of the building pulling images from Google maps that would allow for him to see each firefighter in the building and click on each icon and see the specific info for each firefighter. To be honest, I’m not sure if we got that to work correctly.
We tried to be creative and call it Project Flames. The first semester of our senior year, we worked to lay out the specifics of the project and met with the Lynchburg Fire Department several times to describe our plan for the project. We put together a lot of documentation of things such as our project schedule and when milestones should be met, all of the parts that we would need, etc. We needed to have all of our designs laid out by the end of the first semester so we could work on getting the physical hardware assembled and tested the second semester. I remember there was an issue with the timing of the parts getting in, not just for us, but for everyone since one of the staff members ordered them. Each team only had $500 to work with, so we had to be pretty creative and resourceful with what we designed and bought.
One of the biggest and most important parts of the device (the PCB) I believe was designed by Nathan. I still remember the day he brought them into school and our group worked to put all of the tiny surface mount components on them. We spent countless hours in the capstone design room working on putting things together and testing things. I remember testing to see if the antenna would stay mounted on a car roof by strapping it on to the top of my car and driving around campus. By the end of the semester, we had put a lot of work into it, but I don’t think we ever got it completely functional, unfortunately. We put together a report, a poster board (which I think is still hanging up at Liberty), and did a presentation to wrap up the project.”
“Nathan was a great guy and really had a passion for what he did during school and with the robotics club. He will truly be missed by all of us.”
School of Engineering Graduation Ceremony, May 9, 2015.
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