Austin Northcutt
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Hello, my name is Austin Northcutt and I may be
from North Carolina, my home will always be Colorado. I
was born in the Raleigh/Cary area of NC about 30 minutes away
from the NCSU campus. I am 23 years of age so I am a bit
older than the majority of the class. Cars, ice hockey,
and skiing have been my passions since I could walk on two feet.
Growing up, I was mostly exposed to classic American cars, but
my interests were broadened when I started working a Japanese
specialist auto repair shop. The race cars we worked on at the
shop really had an impact on what I wanted to do with
life. It was the first time I knew exactly what I wanted
to do as a career because it was actually fun to maintain and
build these cars. This is one the of the main reasons why I
chose to major in Mechanical Engineering with a focus in
motorsports. I am especially excited to learn more about the
engineering side of motorsports. The EFI (Electronic fuel
injection) side of the engines fascinates me the most. I
have been teaching myself how to professionally wire and tune
cars for the last few years or so, and quickly realized that a
lot of elements cross over to what we have learned and are going
to learn in the MEGR course load.
I like to think that I know myself pretty well after 23 years being alive. I have many strengths and as much as I hate to admit it, just as many weaknesses. The biggest thing I have noticed about myself is that I am incredibly dedicated to anything I am truly interested in. If it even remotely relates to anything mechanical, I find it easy and fun to learn the concept. On top of that, I usually take it to the next level and try to master the subject or concept if it really interest me (like engine building, and wire harness construction). Outside of school I am very athletic as I have been playing Ice hockey for almost 20 years now. I consider this as one of my strengths because it has taught me teamwork as well as leadership over the years with different teams. I was a part of a travel hockey team for a few years called the "Junior Hurricanes" that I was the captain of for 3 years. Hockey has definitely taught me to have a good work ethic not only physically but as well as mentally and it has definitely translated to school and everything else I do. The last strength I will be listing before I talk about how lazy I am is the fact I am very confident in my mechanical ability to work on cars and generally anything mechanical. I worked with race cars and normal cars for the last 5 years before coming to UNCC and have assembled more engine than I can count. One of my weaknesses should be obvious looking at this web-page and it is HTML coding. I have always been intimidated by coding in general and have very little knowledge on the subject, but after this assignment and also learning a bit of MATLAB in my computations class, I am actually intrigued by it and want to improve on my weakness in coding. Sleep is my next weakness; I have a bad habit of getting carried away in what I am doing and the next thing I know, its 2am in the morning and I have a class at 9am. It usually is not an issue for me but it is definitely something I need to improve upon. Everyone has food weaknesses and mine is junk food. In particular, Insomnia cookies, tacos, Kit-kats and Oreos.
There are many things I would like to do before I die, but they are a bit different than the average persons bucket list. The entries in my list are more so goals I have set for myself to achieve in my lifetime. Graduating from Engineering college is the first item on my list. It is something very important to me because I am coming from a family of engineers and I would very much like to join the club! Next, getting a job as an engineer for a company that has anything to do with professional racing would be a great accomplishment for me. The way I see it, if I truly enjoy my work, I will be happy and content as well as driven with what I do for a career. One of the smaller items on the list is to engineer an engine that generates more than 1000whp someday. Doing so, requires a lot of calculation and planning and hopefully the motorsports program here at UNCC can shed some light on the subject of high performance engines. Next, I have always wanted get into helicopter skiing. I have been skiing for as long as I could ice skate (20 years) and have done plenty of back country CAT trips but never heli-skiing. Being able to see your line on the mountain from the view of the helicopter and have a whole face of the mountain to myself just seems cool to me. Finally, for the last of the five bucket list items, I would like to attend the car show PRI. It is almost like the show SEMA, but it is more directed at the engineering side of motorsports rather than a bunch of vendors showing there products off.
Putting together a list of 3 of the most influential engineering feats in the last 150 years proved to be harder than I initially thought. Eventually I decided on the inventions of the transistor, the gasoline engine, and the X-Ray machine. Transistors have led to most if not all technological advancements today. Modern computers, wireless cell phones, and even microwaves would not exist without the transistor. Next, gasoline engines have opened up opportunities for so many people solely because they provide a means of decent transportation. The ability to travel far distances has allowed for anything to do whatever they want to with their life because transportation is more easily accessible. Lastly, X-Ray machines are the last in my list of influential engineering feats. The medical benefits of x-rays speak for them selves but the concept of how it works was even more influential. After taking modern physics, we learned that the discovery of X-Rays opened up a whole new field in physics and lead to many other discoveries about how particles behave.
With the information I will learn in this course, I hope to design a better wire harness for the engine I have built for my car. It is something I have been researching and learning about for a while now and there are many additions I would like to know more about. The harness will include not only the basics needed to run an engine, but will also feature a standalone ECU with many extra outputs for future expansion. One of these expansions is a CAN-Bus system for the LCD display as well as many switches included in the chassis harness. I would also like to replace the original camshaft and crankshaft sensors with true Hall-effect sensors. Already, I have managed to wire up the ignition harness for this project. Whats left to wire is the injectors, hall effect sensors, pressure sensors, temperature sensors, oxygen sensors, and knock sensors.
This assignment was a bit of a mountain for me. I had
never worked with HTML code before or designed my own website.
Through this whole process I spent probably close to 4.5 hours
on this. My biggest hurdle was making sure all the links
worked correctly as well as uploading the assignment off-campus.
I ran into an issue where I could not connect to the schools
server and was not able to submit the assignment for the longest
time. I found that I had to manually add an exception in
my firewall for the program Firezilla before I could connect.
Overall, this was surprisingly a very fun assignment to tackle
even though I had almost no experience with the subject. Even
though this portfolio may look rough, I am going to continually
update and polish it until I am content with its appearance.
I like to think that I know myself pretty well after 23 years being alive. I have many strengths and as much as I hate to admit it, just as many weaknesses. The biggest thing I have noticed about myself is that I am incredibly dedicated to anything I am truly interested in. If it even remotely relates to anything mechanical, I find it easy and fun to learn the concept. On top of that, I usually take it to the next level and try to master the subject or concept if it really interest me (like engine building, and wire harness construction). Outside of school I am very athletic as I have been playing Ice hockey for almost 20 years now. I consider this as one of my strengths because it has taught me teamwork as well as leadership over the years with different teams. I was a part of a travel hockey team for a few years called the "Junior Hurricanes" that I was the captain of for 3 years. Hockey has definitely taught me to have a good work ethic not only physically but as well as mentally and it has definitely translated to school and everything else I do. The last strength I will be listing before I talk about how lazy I am is the fact I am very confident in my mechanical ability to work on cars and generally anything mechanical. I worked with race cars and normal cars for the last 5 years before coming to UNCC and have assembled more engine than I can count. One of my weaknesses should be obvious looking at this web-page and it is HTML coding. I have always been intimidated by coding in general and have very little knowledge on the subject, but after this assignment and also learning a bit of MATLAB in my computations class, I am actually intrigued by it and want to improve on my weakness in coding. Sleep is my next weakness; I have a bad habit of getting carried away in what I am doing and the next thing I know, its 2am in the morning and I have a class at 9am. It usually is not an issue for me but it is definitely something I need to improve upon. Everyone has food weaknesses and mine is junk food. In particular, Insomnia cookies, tacos, Kit-kats and Oreos.
There are many things I would like to do before I die, but they are a bit different than the average persons bucket list. The entries in my list are more so goals I have set for myself to achieve in my lifetime. Graduating from Engineering college is the first item on my list. It is something very important to me because I am coming from a family of engineers and I would very much like to join the club! Next, getting a job as an engineer for a company that has anything to do with professional racing would be a great accomplishment for me. The way I see it, if I truly enjoy my work, I will be happy and content as well as driven with what I do for a career. One of the smaller items on the list is to engineer an engine that generates more than 1000whp someday. Doing so, requires a lot of calculation and planning and hopefully the motorsports program here at UNCC can shed some light on the subject of high performance engines. Next, I have always wanted get into helicopter skiing. I have been skiing for as long as I could ice skate (20 years) and have done plenty of back country CAT trips but never heli-skiing. Being able to see your line on the mountain from the view of the helicopter and have a whole face of the mountain to myself just seems cool to me. Finally, for the last of the five bucket list items, I would like to attend the car show PRI. It is almost like the show SEMA, but it is more directed at the engineering side of motorsports rather than a bunch of vendors showing there products off.
Putting together a list of 3 of the most influential engineering feats in the last 150 years proved to be harder than I initially thought. Eventually I decided on the inventions of the transistor, the gasoline engine, and the X-Ray machine. Transistors have led to most if not all technological advancements today. Modern computers, wireless cell phones, and even microwaves would not exist without the transistor. Next, gasoline engines have opened up opportunities for so many people solely because they provide a means of decent transportation. The ability to travel far distances has allowed for anything to do whatever they want to with their life because transportation is more easily accessible. Lastly, X-Ray machines are the last in my list of influential engineering feats. The medical benefits of x-rays speak for them selves but the concept of how it works was even more influential. After taking modern physics, we learned that the discovery of X-Rays opened up a whole new field in physics and lead to many other discoveries about how particles behave.
With the information I will learn in this course, I hope to design a better wire harness for the engine I have built for my car. It is something I have been researching and learning about for a while now and there are many additions I would like to know more about. The harness will include not only the basics needed to run an engine, but will also feature a standalone ECU with many extra outputs for future expansion. One of these expansions is a CAN-Bus system for the LCD display as well as many switches included in the chassis harness. I would also like to replace the original camshaft and crankshaft sensors with true Hall-effect sensors. Already, I have managed to wire up the ignition harness for this project. Whats left to wire is the injectors, hall effect sensors, pressure sensors, temperature sensors, oxygen sensors, and knock sensors.