Projects

Table of Contents

Solar Water Heater/Geyser

A 150 litre solar water heater (geyser). It comes with a 1500W heating element, Wi-Fi enabled controller and a mobile app.

I did some market research and bought this geyser from a local company, supervised its installation and managed a team of installers and plumbers, I also set up the mobile app. An IoT and renewable energy project.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Solar Asia, Amir Khan.

Personal website (www.shahbazakhan.com)

Personal website that has various pages like home, about me, projects, CV/resume, blog and a contact form.

My previous hosting plan (WordPress based website) expired and I did not want to pay any more fee so I did some research and came up with a great cost-effective solution using Google Sites. I made the website from scratch again and used the freely available widgets/themes etc. I used my old domain and connected it with this website. 

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Bike-Safe

Bike and traffic safety device (Translational Engineering Forum course at Aalto University). The device has an accelerometer that senses braking and also prevents theft by sounding an alarm if physically moved. The rear part has a brake light, the entire casing was made at Aalto University using 3D printing.

I was the COO (Chief Operating Officer) for the team, I managed overall coordination, technical support for specialists as well as documentation and testing. I gave innovative suggestions for this project.

Project members: Tuomas Haajanen, Shahbaz A. Khan, Sasu Ruuskanen, Tommi Kemmo, Arnab Chakraborty.

Sisu Hike

A system for hiking stats using a smart watch (Embedded Systems Development course at Aalto University). A smart watch would measure various stats and then send them to a NodeJS server running on a RaspberryPi, where it would show the current as well as the previous hiking stats. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, the smart watch part of the project was simulated with HTTP/Postman and JSON. An SQLite database was also implemented in this.

I did the programming for the web server on a RaspberryPi device and also created the front page. I also helped with the documentation and presentation. A significant part of this project was requirements analysis - Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as well as other documents such as user manual and implementation guide.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Hajiba Legrara, Alvar de Wit.

MIAU (Mini drAg sUrveyor)

Feasibility study for a CubeSat (Satellite Systems course at Aalto University). It was a 16U CubeSat to measure drag in the upper atmosphere. We wrote a detailed feasibility study report and presented it.

My role was to help with the overall system design and documentation. We had regular meetings and discussed various system and design matters. 

Project members: Theresa Hoppe, Shahbaz A. Khan, Paavo Siitonen.

500W Solar PV system at home

A 500W solar PV system installed at home with a 1.2kW hybrid inverter and 260Ah batteries. Various safety devices were also installed.

My part in this project was the overall system design and remote supervision, a technician implemented it. I also connected the inverter to a mobile app which shows various energy stats, gives ability to change various settings and also view logs. An IoT and renewable energy project. Note: I would have done the wiring etc. differently but we were in a hurry.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Naeem Gul.

Mobile phone screen and battery replacement

Screen and battery replacement of my Samsung Galaxy A03s phone.

The key takeaways from this are that the democratisation of repairing your devices is brilliant. But most importantly, good communication is extremely important, the online shop did mention part numbers on their website and also the specific model (SM-A037G which is a sub-type of A03s phones) for which those parts are compatible, but unbelievably Samsung (or their suppliers) did not mention the part numbers anywhere on the phone (I do see some tiny QR codes but my phone camera could not read them). My way of doing things would be, I open a product, see a part number and then buy that part (or even a compatible one but then there has to be a list of some sort available), it is that simple. Another thing is that, Samsung has different models of the same phone type (this could be due to many reasons such as regional regulations etc.) but in my humble opinion, I think the length difference of 2mm is not a big deal if you can standardise your products.

Lessons:
Good guides/tutorials are invaluable.

Communication is key.

Standardisation is always good.

Experience does matter (but very few places want to give it to juniors nowadays so you have to get it by yourself).

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

RegEx in Excel

RegEx functionality incorporated into Ms. Excel, a special function was created in Excel.

I quickly learned VBScript and how to use it in Excel, created a special function in Excel that would accept RegEx and implement it on an entire data set. I also wrote a guide for this. A software automation and data analysis project.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Port checker tool

A port testing tool that would check if a host's specific port(s) were open or closed.

I made this solution using NodeJS, JSON and Postman.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Pulse oximeter

An initial breadboard implementation of a pulse oximeter circuit, waveforms could be seen on an oscilloscope.

I implemented the circuit on the breadboard and verified it.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

LED cube (4x4x4)

A 4x4x4 LED cube that I made as a hobby project. Credit: http://www.instructables.com/id/4x4x4-LED-Cube-Arduino-Uno/

My part in this project was the soldering of LEDs and implementation of the overall circuit using an Arduino Uno and provided code.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Article on James Webb Space Telescope

A popular science article on the James Webb Space Telescope that got published on Eqbal Ahmed Center for Public Education's website: https://eacpe.org/james-webb-space-telescope/

I did the background study and writing of this article that was very much liked by the site's readers.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Interfacing pulse oximeter with LabVIEW (using Ardunio)

Reading a pulse oximeter on LabVIEW using Arduino as DAQ device. The PPG was displayed as a waveform on the PC monitor as shown.

I was tasked to interface a ready-made pulse oximeter circuit with LabVIEW using Arduino Mega as the data acquisition device. I did the background study for pulse oximeters and used a third-party library to make the Arduino work as a DAQ device with LabVIEW.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Marks entry form in Excel

Automated grade entry for university students using VBA in Ms. Excel. I used to teach a Physics lab course where we used to enter student grades using a web browser and the trusty ctrl+f, this was very time consuming and cumbersome. I realised that the university system gave us the option to upload grades in an excel sheet, which would then populate the records automatically.

I learned VBA and how to use it in Ms. Excel, the user form shown above was made by me and it can be used in any application by entering the relevant column numbers. One of my colleagues would say the last three digits of a student's roll number and the system would automatically show me their name, I could then enter the grades and update, all with just a numeric keypad. A software automation project.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

DIY quadcopter guide

A DIY guide for making a 3D printed quadcopter. This was a freelance project.

I did the background research for quadcopters and wrote this 10000 word guide. I did the overall system design and software configuration for it (using Naze32 flight controller and CleanFlight chrome extension). I also made a popular YouTube video on how quadcopters work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KC-a97joew

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan

House construction (Islamabad)

A 4200 sq. ft. double storey house in Islamabad. The plot area was 4500 sq. ft.

My role was the overall management of this project. I resarched locations all over the city, purchased the land, hired an architect and gave the contract to a contractor/builder while supervising it. The pictures above are CAD images. This project gave me very essential insights into various aspects such as civil, electrical and plumbing works, market research, communications, teamwork, budgeting, conflict resolution, contracts, relevant laws and regulations, managing sub-contractors and problem solving. The picture below show the state of the project when I handed it over to another manager/owner:

The pictures below show the final completion:

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Adil Yusuf + Associates, Nisar Khan, Faisal Shah, Shiraz Khan & Co, numerous labourers and tradesmen.

Weather app

A tool made in NodeJS to show the current weather conditions of a city.

I made this tool while doing a MOOC.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

3.2kW Solar PV upgrade project

A 3.2kW residential solar PV array with 5kW hybrid inverter. This was an upgrade project from an old off-grid smaller array and inverter.

I did the system design, supervision of a technician and testing of this project. A renewable energy project.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Zar Muhammad.

Social media sharing app

A tool made in Objective-C and X-Code to share status updates on Twitter/X.

I made this tool as part of a MOOC.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Interleaved buck-boost converter (B.Eng. project)

An interleaved buck-boost converter that uses 180 degree phase shifted PWMs to control the switching MOSFETs. The small board on the left is the control board and the large board on the right is the power converter with two giant inductors.

This was my B.Eng. project at the University of Leeds. With the help of my supervisor, I did a background study of power electronic converters, simulations in MATLAB/Simulink and then implemented the circuit initially on a breadboard then a proper PCB. I used dsPIC30F microcontroller and the PCB was designed in Eagle. Further additions were planned (such as feedback control and voltage/current displays) but unfortunately due to the demise of my grandmother, I had to wrap it up.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Dr. Benjamin Chong.

Ultrasonic range finder/parking sensor

An ultrasonic range finder/parking sensor (Embedded Systems Project course at University of Leeds).

I made this project using an ultrasonic distance sensor, Arduino microcontroller and Eagle PCB design software. A third-party library was used for the LCD bar graph. The sensor would change beeping frequency relative to the distance from the target. Special thanks to my colleagues Trung Pham and Tom Carpenter for helping in the overall design.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Trung pham, Tom Carpenter.

LCD and keypad interfacing

Interfacing a 4x4 matrix keypad with a 16x2 LCD (Embedded Systems course at University of Leeds).

Me and my partner interfaced a 4x4 matrix keypad with a 16x2 LCD. We also wrote the initialisation library for the LCD and implemented polling loops to read/display the pressed characters. The microcontroller used was PIC.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Rostom Abou-daya.

Inductinator (iOS app)

Inductinator iOS app (Mobile Applications course at University of Leeds).

I designed and built this iOS app mainly for inductors, colour decoding, design of simple inductors, calculations and a mini web-browser. There was also a resistor colour decoder in it.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

Formula FlowCode buggy challenge

Formula FlowCode line following buggy. (project for a course at University of Leeds).

I had to program the buggy using FlowCode, it was supposed to follow a black line using infrared sensors. In case a line was missing, then the buggy would use ultrasonic sensors to keep a distance from the walls.

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan.

R/C Traxter

Radio controlled traxter project (Circuit Analysis course at University of Leeds).

Our team was given the above shown traxter and we were tasked to develop required circuitry for it. We used multiplexers/demultiplexers, radio transmitter/receiver and an H-Bridge to drive the motor. 

Project members: Shahbaz A. Khan, Mohammad Etarhouni, Robin Fletcher, Samuel Foster, Daniel.