About

My name is Aidan Busby. I am a 16 year old Junior at West Seattle High School. This website is a documentation of some of my STEM-related ventures. I have a variety of interests, but my greatest ones are mathematics, physics, and engineering. I also have a passion for Spanish and music, but these are not the focus of this website.

Tesla Coils

Currently, I have been focused/refocused on programming and electrical engineering. I have built a couple of Tesla coils, and those are fun, but I think I've come to the realization that while high voltage electronics are arguable super badass, they aren't really my passion per se. My first real coil I started working on the end of sophomore year- I can get some pretty good arcs (like 8 inches), but the primary coil is pretty badly designed- I intend to make a new one when I can find a weekend where I don't have five hours of APUSH homework to deal with.

Rockets

Ive also been into rockets - I'm a member of the rocketry club at my school, and have been helping out to design our rocket for the American Rocketry Challenge (you have to get two eggs up to ~750 feet and back down again in about 40 seconds without breaking the eggs). On the side, I am working on designing my own rocket with a custom flight computer. I'm hoping to learn some stuff about designing PCBs and using microcontrollers (for my first prototype I'm going to use an arduino, but down the road I'd like to figure out how to design everything on my own).

Programming

One of my recurring interests has been programming. In middle school, I spent a fair amount of time learning how to program in C- still my favorite language, but I've always had a problem where I will start a project, then fail to finish it. Its also hard to find time to program sometimes, especially when you have a ton of homework. Some of my notable (albiet not finished) projects are a half-finished 6502 emulator I wrote in C in middle school (I still intend to finish that) and a super buggy encrypted messenger (also need to finish this one. I call it Semphore Messenger, you can find it on my github here).

Math

Pertaining to mathematics, I have been doing competetion math for a couple of years now, and have been heading the math team at West Seattle. My goal is to be able to qualify for the AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Exam) senior year. As much as I like mathematics, I wouldn't say I'm extremely well at it (for a mathlete- overall I'm quite good). I wouldn't say I intend to pursue math as a career, but its something I like to do one the side.