Rohan Shah

Please note this site is currently a work in progress. I am still in the process of adding images and videos of my projects and polishing the site. I hope it is still informative in the interim.

About Me

My name is Rohan Shah and I am excited to work at the intersection of robotics, energy, and areospace. Ever since I was a kid, I have been inspired by science fiction and NASA to dream of the stars. I believe that the future is bright, but only if we build it. I also love to sail and dream of sailing the Mediterranian. I have recently started hiking at the behest of some friends and have now spent a summer hiking in the Whites of New Hampshire and the Cascades/Olympics in Seattle. My favorite peak was Mt. St Helens. Looking down into the crater was a strange and awe inspiring site.

Work Experience

Stoke Space Avionics Intern - Summer 2025

At Stoke, I was tasked with designing a HIL Simulator of an Electronic Safe and Arm Device for FTS to verify our FTS system on the ground, and to pave the way for a flight in-house ESAD. The ESAD is responsible for arming, safing, and triggering the Bulk Destruct Charge, which is responsible for terminating thrust in the rocket in the case of an anomaly to safeguard the public. This requires a high voltage, high current pulse (1000V 1000A) to be delivered with a rise time of less than 100ns. This was the core challenge of the project, requiring careful part selection and layout to create a low inductance firing path, while standing off low-voltage electronics. The board also contained discrete logic to trigger the firing, safing, and arming circuit. These logic systems were built with simple logic gates to reduce power consumption and remove firmware. The project required that I get up to speed with FAA/Range requirements in the form of RCC-1,9 along with the accompanying tailoring documents. By the end of the internship, I had successfully brought up a Rev 0 board spin, verifying the digital logic systems and successfully creating the high voltage pulse. I am currently contracting with Stoke this Fall to design another revision of this board to bring it to flight standards.

Portfolio

Current Projects

Chimera

I am currently working on a small beetleweight combat robot. I have been designing the robot in my spare time and hope to compete at NHRL late this year or early next year. Chimera is a lifting-flamer robot that I am designing with fully custom electronics. I am desinging off-meta because my primary interest is to build for fun, not to build a particularly competitive robot. The PCB and electronics were designed in Ki-Cad. I am currently bringing these first development boards up. I have started manufacturing the mechanical components of the robot, with wheels, axles, and other systems being produced.

Past Projects

Thorondor

In the fall of my sophmore year, I took a class called Principles of Integrated Engineering. In the classs we were given 6 weeks and 250 dollars to build an integrated engineering project on a team of 5. My team decided to attempt to build a RC bi-copter inspired by the V-22 Osprey. I worked on the eletrical systems and helped design the control algorithms. By the end of the 6 weeks we built a drone that could achieve stable flight for a few seconds before pitching out of control This was due to our control loop being constrained to 200hz as our budget limited us to using a RP2040 based microcontroller. One of our final deliverables for the class was to make a website highlighting the project. This project was a lot of fun and challenged every member of the team. At some point I want to upgrade the avionics with a Teensy to allow for stable flight.

Olin Rocketry

My freshmen and sophmore year I was a member of my colleges rocketry team. I worked on developing our flight avionics hardware as well as writing firmware in C++. I worked on developing a Kalman filter that would allow us to control

SailTracker

Since high school I have sailed dinghies competively. Much of competitve racing revolves around small optimizations to keep speed through manuvers. Many larger boats are equiped with position and velocity tracking systems that allow racers to tune their preformance. I was inspired by these to try to develop my own sailtracker. I designed my first PCB in Ki-Cad after prototyping the system on a breadboard and learned about the math behind Kalman Filtering. I brought the board up, reworked some problems with the board, and wrote firmware in C++.

Academics

I am currently a Junior at the Olin College of Engineering Studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition to my major, I am taking a humanties concentration in Philosphy. I expect to graduate in the spring of 2027.

Current Course Load: Mixed Analog Digital VLSI, Probablistic Modeling, Thermodynamics, Introduction to Methaphysics and Epistimiology

Previous Course Work

These are a few of the courses I have taken in the last 2 years that I have learned a lot from and that I have enjoyed.

Introduction to Micro Electronic Circuits

Skills: Circuit Analysis, LTspice, Analog Design/Analysis

In this class I learned the basics of micro electronics with a focus on analog design and hand analysis. The course covered BJT's and MOSFETS in all regions of operations. The class was lab based, with weekly assignments that involved using hand calculations to predict the behavior of a circuit, building and testing the circuit, and then extending the circuit in simulation. For my final project I attempted to construct a True Random Number Generator using a bistable element circuit. Unfortunately I was unable to generate random behavior due to poorly matched components and a poorly controlled testing setup. My final writeup is:linked here

Computer Architecture

Skills: Verilog, Automated Verification, FPGA, Digital design

Computer Architecture walked from logic gates to designing a RISC-IV processor. During the class we used a ICE-0 FPGA Dev Board to complete a series of mini-projects covering the basics of implementing state machines, fetches from memory, and counters. For the final mini-project we were tasked with designing a RISC-IV processor. I designed a processor with a Harvard Architecture. Here is a picture of the block diagram I used to develop my processor. I developed automatic test benches in System Verilog to verify the function of the processor. For my final project I developed a memory mapped soft UART core for the processor and tested it in simulation. All of the development files can be found on my github.

Advanced Systems Programming In Rust

Skills: Rust, Firmware Development

In this class I learned Rust and some of it's fun quirks (generics, the borrow checker, unsafe). I really enjoyed learning the language, and now use RUST as my main Programming language for larger projects. The class also allowed me to try out Rust firmware, specifically for the RP2040. For my final project I partnered with another student to create a rudimentery HIL testing setup. We used a RP2040 to act as a flight Computer with another RP2040 acting as a HIL tester, mocking accelerometer data for the flight computer. The HIL unit communicated with a laptop running a physics simulation to create fake data. I worked on the firmware for both the HIL unit and the mock Flight Computer, while my partner developed the Physics Engine. Here is a link to the github page for the class.