You have reached the website of Owen McCormick of Bend, OR.

Music Portfolio

Song: Danse Rustique by William Henry Squire

Song: Gigue from Bach Cello Suite No. 3 in C major

Project Portfolio

Robotics

Out of all the software I put together to run our FRC robot last year as the team's programming lead, I'm most proud of the "auto shoot" function pictured below. I wrote software that estimates the right shooting angle and velocity for the robot to score into the goal accurately from any given nearby location. I got an excuse to apply some of the concepts from my physics classes out in the real world.

I'm standing in the background with the green shirt and loved every second of the events where this feature worked in competition.

Radio Telescope

Last summer, I saw a tutorial online from a maker who built a DIY radio telescope out of a TV satellite dish. The idea was to measure the signal strength of the dish when aimed at dozens of points in the sky and compile those points together into an honest-to-goodness low resolution radio image. My parents had an old dish sitting in the garage that we previously thought was trash, and I realized I could give it a second life. I found a tripod and a Raspberry Pi, designed 3D printed mounting parts, scavenged stepper motors from a CNC machine, and reached out to friends on the robotics team who could teach me the soldering I needed. I ended up with a neat in-progress toy and a new potential demo for the observatory. This was one of the more fun things I did all summer and I don’t regret taking the time to try.

Timelapse of sky scan:

And a noisy low-res radio picture of the sky from a full grid of measurements:

Game Programming

I enjoy creating ASCII / text-based games to practice my coding and have fun in the process.

I wrote the one I'm most proud of in C++ last year and the project spanned 1400 lines of code.

I experimented with using cellular automata to randomly generate the game world.

The most interesting part, though, was learning about graph theory and the A* pathfinding algorithm and writing my own pathfinding code from scratch.

RECON

Twice so far in my experience as a volunteer at the Sunriver Nature Center and Observatory, I've helped the crew there with a citizen science project called RECON, or Research and Education Collaborative Occultation Network. This is a program run by the Southwest Research Institute where amateur and professional astronomers send in time- and geo-stamped photos of a star at the exact moment that a particular asteroid orbits to occlude it. With enough photos taken to their specifications by citizen scientists from different latitudes, the researchers running the program can deduce characteristics of the asteroid like size and shape.

I've participated in setup, observation, and cleanup for RECON as part of my functions as an SNCO volunteer.