Thomas Knout

Thomas Knout

Mechanical engineering student in Toronto. I design small pieces of hardware, from the enclosure to the circuit board to the software that drives it, and then use them every day at my desk.

Special Project Lead at Diversified Power. Previously a Quality & Technical Engineering Intern at BMW Group Canada.

[email protected] All projects

Render of the app volume mixer: a dark grey sloped enclosure with a four-channel screen showing Spotify 72, Discord 42, Game 88 and Master 30, three white keys, and four faders with dice-shaped caps.

App Volume Mixer

Enclosure, PCB, firmware and a Windows app

Windows lets you set a separate volume for every app, but only by digging through a menu. This puts it on four physical faders. Each fader is assigned to one program, and the screen above shows every channel's level in that program's colour. The LED by each fader matches.

BANK− and BANK+ page through more apps when four isn't enough. The fader caps are dice, so the pips tell you which channel is which.

The board, rev A

  • Four slide potentiometers, one per channel
  • Three mechanical switches: BANK−, SEL, BANK+
  • Header for the SPI display
  • UART header
  • USB-C to the PC

As built

Three printed flight radar units in blue, tan and black, on angled stands. The screens show a radar scope with range rings and labelled aircraft.

Desktop Flight Radar

Round touchscreen, live aircraft data, printed enclosure

A small round screen that shows the planes over Toronto right now. One view is a city map with every aircraft labelled by callsign, type and altitude. The other is a radar scope with range rings.

Tap a plane and it pulls up a photo of that exact aircraft, the airline, where it's flying from and to, its altitude, speed, heading, climb rate and how far it is from my desk.

The bezel screws on, so it can be printed in any colour.

Map view, live over Toronto.
Air Canada 828 to Copenhagen, 13.5 nm away and climbing.

Earlier projects

Experience

Diversified Power logo

Diversified Power Inc.

Special Project Lead

Diversified Power, Ormond and Diversified Lifting Solutions are sister companies in hydraulic tooling and lifting. I reworked all three websites so that a customer who finds one of them is pointed to what the others offer, which brings more leads into the group as a whole.

I also build the tools the office runs on: the rental-tracking software, the digitized inventory, and the move to Odoo ERP, from picking it in a fit-gap analysis through data migration and training the staff. I led the company's Canada Digital Adoption Program project.

BMW Group logo

BMW Group Canada

Quality & Technical Engineering Intern

Ran vehicle test-fitments and software validations, and kept the special-tool inventory and calibrated equipment in order. Compiled service-trend KPIs and went through retailer feedback for process fixes. Reviewed and updated technical bulletins, and prepared reports for engineering, legal and police.

Contact

[email protected]

Co-op roles, projects, or questions about anything here.

Or send it as a paper plane