I'm Adam Schilperoort, a 30-year-old software engineer currently living in the Tucson area. This website is mainly for my entertainment and to have an online portfolio for posting some of the fun things I've worked on (...those that aren't covered by an NDA of course). My career has taken me on a tour through robotics, astronomy, rocket science, and industrial flow automation, but who knows where I could end up next! C/C++ is my language of choice, and I get particularly excited whenever I get to work on any real-time data processing application, especially one on an embedded Linux kernel! Speed is everything!!!
Lately I seem to be a sporty/outdoorsy combo with some creative projects on the side- my list of activities range from hiking, camping, mountain biking, road cycling (here's the Strava), triathlon, climbing (only indoors so far), downhill skiing, home coffee roasting & brewing (and drinking), 3D printing, painting, astrophotography, jazz trombone, (bad) music production, and raising my indoor plants. I like to race the Tour de Tucson every year, travel in the winter for ski trips, and do an occasional long vacation in a foreign country. I've been to 5 of the 7 continents, but only 11 countries! My home gym is a work in progress, and I have a long list of DIY projects (landscaping, improvements around my pool, workshop, etc) I hope to complete when I get some free time.
Recently I've been reading a few philosophy books. My day typically starts with the Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday) and I'll dig into Sarte and Camus whenever possible to challenge myself. My book collection is always expanding, though I have to admit I'm unable to keep up!
My professional trajectory began at an internship at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Az (specifically the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer instrument on Anderson Mesa) where I was introduced to the concept of Adaptive Optics and worked on programming a full closed-loop system for several 1-meter telescopes. Although I had previous experience with motor controllers and collecting data from sensors from my time at the NAU robotics team and rocket club, dealing with real-time image processing, deformable mirrors, fast steering mirrors, and other motorized optical components was a different (and way more precise) beast. As an ECE who switched into a CS and Math dual major I had some physics, however optics is on a whole other level of complexity, and it did take me a while to make it over the initial learning curve!
After Lowell, I moved down to Tucson to work for Hart Scientific, a company specializing in the commercialization, standardization, and manufacture of adaptive optics systems run by Dr. Michael Hart, a former professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. The focus on making laser communication work (ground-to-space) on a global scale was one of the primary reasons why I was so excited to work there. While there, I worked with a roster of amazing scientists and engineers and had the opportunity to participate in the whole life-cycle of developing a product- from initial engineering to seeing it go live on-sky! At HartSCI I gained a firmer grasp on software architecture, getting a full-stack experience from rewriting low-level controls software to optimizing the web-server and plots on the interface.
Dearman Systems, an industrial flow automation company earned my attention due to aligning with some of my career goals and offering me a fresh challenge, so I switched industries. There I learned all about bulk liquid & gas storage and was the principle software engineer deploying the backend code of our database-driven solution for oil terminals around the world. I became the 'devops' engineer as well as we transitioned into a new version of code released at the end of 2024.
My passion in optics and astronomy eventually called me back, and I accepted a position at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics, where I currently work! The current project is an exoplanet research telescope getting launched into space! My current responsibilities include writing apps for communicating with hardware and running data processing loops in the lab so we can better understand performance of our science techniques.
While an undergraduate CS student at NAU, I joined a NASA-sponsored rocket team (Space Jacks) which happened to have some overlap with the ASME robotics group I worked with the year before. We designed and built a rocket from scratch, and even though I was in charge of electronics and software, I also helped hand-lay carbon fiber sheets around our mold with proper application of epoxy resin and silica to build our main body tube. I designed, soldered up, and programmed a data-collection module inside our payload bay using an Arduino Uno, altimeter, accelerometer, barometric sensor, SD card, 9-volt-battery, and some wire. We had a second module which independently measured altitude and would detonate charges to blow its nose cone off and deploy a parachute upon return. The fun part was after we were done, I got to play with the accelerometer data normalized against our altimiter data to build out a projection of our flight path! This was an experience with some talented individuals and faculty sponsors like Carson Pete! I'm so excited the team keeps on succeeding!
The site I worked at was the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer, in Flagstaff, a joint project between NOFS, NRL, and Lowell to perform high angular resolution astrometry. The site had been designed and built in the late 1900s and had a long history of engineering upgrades to achieve new science objectives. While I was there, Dr. Gerard van Belle led a project to upgrade the interferometer to use 3 1-meter aperture telescopes on mobile platforms which would utilize the entire array. As the longest-baseline optical interferometer in the world, upgrading from 6-inch flat siderostats to 1-meter apertures would significantly broaden its science ability, unlocking the ability to resolve darker objects. 1-meter apertures required the application of adaptive optics to correct for the effect atmospheric turbulence, so that's where I came in! Our setup used a traditional shack-hartmann wavefront sensor to measure gradients of phase error across sections of the aperture, then applied corrections to a deformable mirror to flatten the wavefront, correcting the accumulated discrete phase error. The software interfaced with the hardware (Photometrics CCD camera, OKO Deformable Mirror, and custom Fast Steering Mirror) and built in the necessary calibration and data-processing loops. Great article on AO here
The goal at Lowell had been to make the interferometer work by using a specific use-case of AO, but at HartSCI, the goal was to use AO to build a commercial product that would be widely applicable for observatories around the globe. There our focus was to develop an incredibly cohesive and maintainable codebase with the fastest possible correction loop and a great interface which any astronomer could easily use. To make the interface truly 'easy' we had to develop a significant layer of automation which required performing all sorts of extra data processing and state logic to trigger activities when certain criteria were met. This was a fairly lofty task considering no other AO system on the planet has such sophisticated automation, typically having a human in the loop instead who is looking at live camera images to decide when to adjust optical components, perform calibrations, adjust telescope tracking, or restart the AO system depending on tracking data. There's so many different conditions to consider and such a fairly complicated decision tree to build that only the most hardcore attempt it!
During my time as a software engineer at Dearman Systems, I was exposed to the bulk liquid storage industry and all the different hardware and software protocols that have become standard in that field. The low-level software I maintained orchestrated a load sequence from when a driver arrives at a terminal to when they leave with BOL in-hand and product in the barge/tank/truck/trailer/railcar. Pieces of sofware within that automation system would touch all kinds of terminal hardware from DEUs, RFID sensors, access gates, flow meters, valves, temperature sensors, pressure gauges, tank levels, weigh scales, PLCs, and flow controllers such as Multiloads, Acculoads, Microloads, Danloads, LCRIQs, etc.. Every piece of data associated with loading was authenticated and connected to a database which allowed for multi-terminal data unification and automating terminal inventory management as a whole. I worked directly with customers like Colonial, IMTT, NGL, and AmeriGas to implement custom features in the code to modify their load sequence in some way, collect data from new sensors, or add some feature in the automation process. I took a partial role as a devops engineer designing the new version of software (V5) which will allow the business to scale and secure hundreds of new customers around the planet!
At Steward Observatory's Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at the University of Arizona, I work for Dr. Ewan Douglas and a team of scientists and engineers on multiple space telescopes and instruments designed for exoplanet research. My work involes implementing apps within the open-source frameworks CACAO and MagAO-X to interface with hardware, perform data processing/analysis, and implement automation in the Adaptive Optics. A few techniques of interest involve using wavefront sensors for phase retrieval of the primary mirror so we can correct surface deformations the mirror undergoes under thermal drift, and using images from a lyot-stop rejection to detect low-order phase and correct for optical path aberrations.
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