Home About Me Blog Friends Projects

Allison Byrnes

Hi! My name is Allison, I'm a Denver-based aerospace engineer focusing on guidance, navigation and control (GNC) systems. Thanks for visiting! This site serves as a place for me to showcase my work, talk about myself, and link to some people and projects I really like. I'm currently employed by Pacific Light & Hologram. You can see some of my past projects below, along with links to relevant sites and details!

Basics:

Location: Denver

Pronouns: she/her

Occupation: Guidance & control engineer

Age: 20 years old

My Projects!

CU SRL

This is my university's rocketry team! Over the past few years I've been their avionics team lead, directing the development of complex embedded systems including hardware, software, RF downlink, and more. I also took a lot of the photos on their website! Currently I'm working on completely revamping our avionics system to incorporate a whole host of new features including recovery deployment for our Mamba 3 launch in Spring 2024.

Rocket Control Computers

A few years back I took my first foray into making hardware to control high-power rockets. There were a lot of mistakes made, but in the end I had a device for which I did 100% of the hardware/software dev. I was really proud of this, and it had a lot of good features- Euler angle guidance, inertial position determination, dual-event deployment, and RF downlink, among others. I apply a lot of those skills to SRL today, and I'm working on something new in this department soon, so stay tuned!

Homelab/servers

I run a lot of services I use daily on a server in my apartment! Mostly this is just done to save on costs (AWS is expensive and I'm a college student) but it's also a fun project that's taught me a lot about networking. A few of the things I host include Home Assistant, Plex, Pi-hole (for local DNS firewall), and NAS/backup services.

Various keyboards & macropads

Over the years I've made a variety of keyboards, macropads, interface devices, and controllers to make my life easier. These taught me some of my first PCB design skills, as well as some firmware basics and frankly more than I ever cared to know about HID protocol.

Rocket 3D Printer

Another work in progress! A lot of other people have tried 3D printing rockets big and small (myself included!) to varying degrees of success. However, the z-axis limitations of modern printers are usually pretty constraining for this. That bothers me, so I decided the best way to fix it was to make a printer that's 2 full meters tall. This is, in fact, definitely not the best way to fix it, but it's funny so I'm building it anyway. The plan is to use a CoreXY flying gantry solution with kinematic couplings- basically just making a Voron longer.

High-power rockets

Since I just can't make myself stop building rockets when I get home from work, this is one of my hobbies too! I've built quite a lot of these things over the years, starting from when I was around 12 and getting bigger ever since. Turns out when you get adult money you still spend it on tubes of energetics.

This website!

Everything you see here was designed and written by me! It runs on a remote hosting service and was written in Astro (which is a really cool project and you should click through to check it out!) It's hosted with GitHub sites and I regularly update it with new blog posts etc. Thanks for visiting!

Tungsten Cube Rocket

This one's still in progress! Unfortunately yes, you did hear and see that right. Somehow I decided this would be really funny, and objectively it is, but I haven't had a spare $500 lying around to buy a gigantic cube of Tungsten, so this model has sat gathering dust for a bit. This is the result of an interesting Twitter conversation and someone essentially telling me I couldn't make a tungsten cube break the sound barrier.