Adam Schultzer (extended)

Education

• Bachelor/Master of Science, Computer Engineering, December 2027
• Expected Minor: Quantum Information Science and Technology or Electrical Engineering (or both!)

Work Experience

Controls Engineering Intern/Research, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton NY

• Developed an EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) control driver to interface with the BioLogic VSP-300.
• Driver interfaces with the bluesky experiment orchestration framework in order to be used alongside existing systems in the NSLSII (National Synchrotron Light Source II)
• Interfaces with major experiments on roughly a third of the NSLSII facility's beamlines
• Eliminated a large manual step in using the device, allowing many more experiments to be fully automated
• Used C++ for the primary driver that interfaced with the device API directly.
• Allowed for control over ethernet
• Preserves GUI control using a CS-Studio screen
• Used C++ bindings of EPICS
• Used Python for a secondary driver that interfaced with hardware outputs on the physical device.
• Did not interfere with function of vendor software
• Focused on tracking important datapoints in order to control experiment flow
• Used ophyd python bindings

Image Sensor Characterization Intern, SRI International, Rochester NY

• Collected low-light image data at the Max Farash Center, a big open field somewhat away from Rochester light pollution
• Created a complex automated test setup using many cameras, a laptop, a raspberry pi, and a few python scripts
• Had to go after astronomical twilight, requiring many nights of going down to the Farash Center very late at night and in the cold :(
• Did a hefty amount of analysis on data collected from these trips, as well as more specific tests, to optimize sensor parameters
• Goal of minimizing sensor SNR
• Used simulated annealing to find a good minimum noise state
• Used Verilog to design a hardware interface for color demosaicing in a color sparse filter
• One pixel of red and blue, and two of green in each 8x8 pixel area created extremely low frequency color information
• Hardware buffered only 16 extra lines of the image to reconstruct a reasonably color image
• Complex algorithm for recreating the color artifacting on a non-color image allowed for removing of most artifacts

Projects

Finished(?) Projects

Presentinator (Crowd Understanding Machine)

• A system for gauging a crowd's interest and opinion, particularly built for the the usecase of a giving a presentation
• Originally build for RIT's Society of Physics Students for their semesterly presentation night
• Special thanks to Jack Monti for enlisting me for this
• My most recent community service project and it wasn't even for a club I'm in
• Based on the voting system found in the Jackbox game "Talking Points"
• Frontend logic written in TypeScript, with visuals being done with standard HTML and CSS
• Split into host and vote pages
• Host starts rooms and polls server for changes in vote tallies
• Vote page simply lets server know when a vote has been cast
• Backend also written in TypeScript for Node
• Has a reasonble room code system going on, where rooms will persist indefinitely until no votes are cast for 24 hours
• Other than the rooms, an extremely simple server
• GitHub Link

Active Projects

Basic Video Card using an FPGA

• Created with the intent to teach myself about FPGAs
• This was probably obvious
• Used a variant of Verilog
• Output a valid VGA video output that was accepted by a monitor.
• Lower effective resolution than actual VGA resolution due to clock speed limitations
• Displayed geometric shapes and patterns as a test case

Skills

Computing

• HDL Programming: Lots of experience in VHDL from classes, and some Verilog experience from personal projects
• Serial Communication: Formal experience from multiple class and informal experience from countless random personal projects
• Plan to develop this skill further by developing VHDL program that uses UART to communicate
• Hardware-Software Interfaces: Developing interfaces between physical hardware and either user-friendly programs or firmware
• Firmware experience comes largely from class and in the form of both assembly and C
• Connecting hardware to user-friendly programs in my experience has largely fallen under the task of controls engineering during my internship at BNL
• I have done a few projects where I developed both firmware-level and user-level programs that work alongside each other

Programming Languages (In order of how much I like them)

• Java: So many projects that I can't count (I accidentally deleted around twenty in 2018), easily my most proficient language. If I need to get something to work correctly quickly, I do it in Java
  • Favorite Project: Hard to choose
• C/C++: I am more familiar with C++ than C, but have been using both in some form for at least since 2019. Most of my C knowledge comes from embedded programming with various microcontrollers, while most of my C++ knowledge comes from game engine development
  • Favorite Project (C): Embedded Chess Engine
  • Favorite Project (C++): VR Engine
• Assembly: So far I am mostly proficient in Arm assembly, and as of the Spring 2025 semester I am taking two classes about MIPS processors and programming them, so I'm certain I will be confident in MIPS assembly soon enough
  • Favorite Project: Fancy Schmancy UART driver
• TypeScript/JavaScript: Although these are two very separate languages, I am grouping them because I don't actually use plain JavaScript for all that much, only for projects that don't need much interactivity, like this website. I far prefer TypeScript, and have used it for a lot of projects so far. I can admit I don't always write the cleanest code, but I haven't stumbled across a frontend project that I haven't been able to crack with some TypeScript
  • Favorite Project: monke.gay
• VHDL: Not super proficient relative to professionals, but pretty decent in the context of being a student. I seem to be in a very small subset of people who enjoy writing VHDL despite the crime that is its syntax, and I hope to get much better at VHDL in the future (maybe at a co-op?)
  • No favorite project yet, but there is likely soon to be one
• SQL: About as proficient in SQL as I feel I'll ever need to be, even though that's largely the basics. I have used MySQL as the database backend for several projects, both for storing authentication hashes/salts and for storing player data and inventories
  • Favorite Project: Schedge.net
• Python: I am pretty solid at Python, and have programmed a lot of projects using it, since as much as I may hate it, it works pretty well for small tasks. I also used it at my BNL internship, as I needed to use the ophyd, bluesky, and caproto libraries extensively. Despite being very good at Python, I despise the syntax and if given the option will use pretty much anything else
  • Favorite Project: FRC Scouting Discord Bot
• Verilog: I only have Verilog at the bottom of this list due to the fact that I have very little experience with it, but have used it. I'm certain that if I took the time to learn more Verilog that I would enjoy it more than Python
  • Favorite Project: Basic FPGA Video Card

Web Technologies

• WebSockets: I have done a few projects now that required the use of WebSockets. Personally I'm a huge fan aside from the relatively small HTTP overhead, and they have fit seamlessly into projects that otherwise would have been impossible.
• HTML/CSS: I didn't include this with the programming languages since HTML and CSS aren't programming languages, but I have used them in every project that included TypeScript or JavaScript, aside from a single project with NodeJS. I have used them in both normal web design as well as to design interfaces with microcontrollers like the ESP32
• NGNIX: I use NGINX for hosting the webserver that handles every website I have created, those being mainly this website, Schedge.net, and monke.gay, as well as various other projects hosted as subpages of those websites. I have messed around a lot with the configurations to get everything working as I want, which has given me a lot of experience with getting them right

Software Proficiencies

• The Obvious:
• IDEs/Editors: VSCode, Visual Studio, Vim, Keil µVision, Quartus Prime, Vivado, Notepad++
• Document Creation: Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, LaTeX
• Operating Systems: Windows, Linux (mostly Debian)
• The Less Obvious
• 3D Modelling/CAD/3D Printing: Blender, Fusion 360, Onshape, Cura Slicer
• Music/Audio: Musescore, Audacity
• Graphics: paint.net, Inkscape