🔋March, April & May 2024
Speaking at WSAI, estimating battery SOC, and finishing TKS
🔋Hey, I’m Sasha :)
I’m a 16 year old based near Toronto who’s super interested in battery tech and electronics. I’m currently diving deeper into circuitry and programming as a whole! Outside of this, I love to go running and biking, especially as the weather gets sunnier. Welcome to the past few months of my life :D
Highlights:
Meeting some of my closest friends in Montreal and Switzerland
Tying for first in the TKS Activate Earthshots
Speaking at World Summit AI in Montreal
🗻Skiing in the Swiss Alps (with JENS)
At the beginning of March, I travelled to Switzerland to go skiing. While I was there, I was able to meet up with one of my favourite people -
!!!!
Thank you Jens for making the ~4-hour train ride - skiing with you was the highlight of my trip. And I love Switzerland, it is stunning and unbelievably clean.
I noticed that after ~30 seconds of appreciating the view, it became just a backdrop. This trip made me realize the importance of consciously appreciating the beauty around you and the luck of being where you are right now.
🥐Speaking at World Summit AI in Montreal
In late April, I got the opportunity to speak at World Summit AI about my battery project, which uses an ML model to estimate battery state of charge (SOC)!
The biggest thing I took away from this talk was the importance of tailoring your presentation to your audience. Figure out who they are and what they care about, then position yourself in a way that aligns with their interests.
You can check out my talk here :)
🏍️Bringing motorcycle taxis to rural Tanzania
For the final project at TKS, we were tasked with designing a solution to a problem that should have been solved 10 years ago.
After looking into many different areas,
, , and I decided to focus on how a lack of transportation contributed to poverty, specifically in rural Tanzania.The main issue is cost, with a motorcycle, one of the best forms of transport there, costing 6 years’ worth of income.
Through speaking with Tanzanian residents and many root cause analyses, we designed a financing model that would remove the upfront cost barrier of purchasing a motorcycle via daily payments over 2 years. The result was a 3X increase in the incomes of those with motorcycles!
After 4 weeks, we pitched to an extremely impressive board of judges (thanks Max and Mikaela!), and got second with a tiebreaker 💪
We’re currently looking into running a pilot to try to make an actual impact with this project. Learn more about our solution by watching our pitch video :)
Some takeaways from this (final) TKS project:
Choose your team carefully.
Our team was fantastic - we had loads of fun but still got stuff done. This is the project I have some of my favourite memories from TKS from - lying on the floor the night before presentations trying to come up with a storyboard with Aliyan, Kai insisting that we should go back to working on bees, and pitching beer production as a solution to food waste in the first Earthshot session.
This balance is hard to strike, but I think it is a combination of working with people you know well and who you think are cracked + have a ton of respect for (indirect shoutout to my amazing team ;)).
Talk to users.
I’m just going to leave it at this:
Pivot quickly.
Too often, teams will go from beautiful, pointed formation, into a chaotic overlapping of trajectories. One thing that worked very well for us was daily syncs. We had the luxury of being in the same timezone, but there are probably ways to work around that. This meant that we iterated on our solution daily and were able to correct for any misalignments related to what needed to be done and what the objectives were.
🥳Back in Montreal for C2
Montreal has become one of my favourite cities. It’s stunning, has millions of lovely cafes, and has such incredible vibes. Part of the reason I love it so much, and shoutout to Kai for making me realize this, is the fact that every time I’ve been, I’ve been surrounded by some of my favourite humans.
The people make the experience. I have so many amazing memories from Montreal. For example breakfast in a cafe with Aatik, Markus, Elya (Aatik’s daughter!!), and Kai. This was the second time I’ve been to Montreal, and this time I was there to attend C2, a tech conference.
I had a great time at the conference, it was at a lovely venue and I saw a lot more of Montreal. One of my biggest takeaways was the importance of communication and “softer skills” as opposed to just being technically capable.
There is more to a human than their proficiency in python, and this conference helped me internalize that.
👩💻Estimating battery SOC with an Arduino and Extended Kalman filter
I’m super excited to share that I’ve finished the project I’ve been working on for the past ~5 months: estimating battery SOC! This project was a whirlwind of learning: I started not even knowing how matrix multiplication worked (spoiler: the entirety of the algorithm I used was matrix multiplication).
I didn’t know anything about circuitry, so I short-circuited my battery more times than I’d like to admit. And I knew only very basic syntax and programming concepts, never mind how to code a machine learning model.
So, as you can imagine, this was quite hard. But it was worth it :)
Some takeaways I have from building this:
Talk to people about your project.
I’d always thought that no one cared enough or had the necessary context for me to dive into technicalities with. But that’s simply because I hadn’t found the right people.
Just explaining myself out loud was often enough to identify some error. And usually, the people I was talking to had some new perspective that I completely missed because I was too deep in the weeds. (Huge shoutout to
for all of his help and interest!!)Also, find technical mentors in the specific area you are in, because they will have the necessary context and thus can help you work around blockers much faster. I’d also like to thank Antonio Zhou for all of the resources and insights he shared with me!!
Go back to the fundamentals.
When something didn’t work (circuit, code, whatever) and the problem wasn’t immediately obvious, the first thing I’d do was go through every step and component of the system to pinpoint the error. (Shoutout to
for explaining how to do this in code!)Document everything. Everything.
You will forget what you learned if you don’t. You might even forget how to do it if it was complicated enough. And if you mess up somewhere, it’s so helpful to have the reference point of the last time it worked.
For example, when one component of my code worked the way I wanted it to, even if there were still a couple of bugs, I’d put it in github as storage and then just continue modifying it within VS code. That way, if I messed up the whole thing, I could just restart with the old code. I did the same thing with my circuit - my camera roll has ~200 pictures of a breadboard XD
To learn more about what I built and how, check out the video I made :)
Completing TKS, the program that started this all
Earlier today, we had our final TKS session. TKS is a human accelerator program for high school students. This 2 year journey that seems like the beginning of my life is officially “over.”
I’m eternally grateful to all the amazing people I met throughout the program- Max, Mikaela, Pranav, Jennah, the rest of the director team, and so so so many amazing people building insane things. You guys inspire me every day - to question the limiting beliefs I have, to push myself harder, and to raise my ambitions.
The skills, mindsets, and connections I’ve gained throughout the program have immeasurable value. 2-year-ago me would be floored with the person I am today, and I’m so incredibly proud and grateful for that.
But as Max and Navid (TKS founder) said today, the work is just now beginning. We’ve been given the tools. Now it’s time to go build 🚀
I cannot wait to see how the next few years unfold for everyone I’ve met in the program.
Will be releasing more content with a reflection soon 👀
More pictures :)
🚀What’s up next:
Travelling to Ireland for the Emergent Ventures Summit in August
Visiting Sacramento and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail using a PCB my team and I made
Attending the 1517 Summit in Toronto (lmk if you’ll be there!)
More arduino projects 🤖
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you in the next one :)
— Sasha
lets go sasha! so proud of u <3
Wish I could have been there for your talk!! Bet you did amazing :)