Meet the QUACK Team
The QUACK box is the product of a group of students from Harvey Mudd College, working within what’s called a “Clinic” team — clinic is like a capstone experience for Harvey Mudd engineers.
First, Some Acknowledgements
HRL Laboratories sponsored our clinic experience, with the quantum researchers Andrew Oriani, Paul Jerger, and Abbie Wessels overseeing our project from start to finish. These three expert liaisons gave us valuable insight into their laboratory work, guided the direction of our work, offered earnest and thoughtful feedback, and generally helped us develop a successful product. The student team extends our most sincere gratitude to HRL’s experts for providing us with this opportunity!
Additionally, Harvey Mudd pairs the student team with an advisor from the college. Professor Joshua Brake served as our team’s advisor, supporting us with his wealth of knowledge in electrical engineering and team dynamics. His guidance and probing technical questions were essential to the successful execution of our project, and we thank him greatly for his help!
Finally, our team would like to thank the others who helped us along the way. Thank you to Sho Uemura, who’s expert guidance through the QICK firmware and Vivado software helped our team over several hurdles. Thank you also to the staff and faculty in Harvey Mudd’s engineering department, who helped keep our clinic experience afloat with equipment and administrative services.
We hope you enjoy the QUACK box, and its many quirks. It is a first-ever prototype, after all. QUACK!
The Student Team
Ellie Sundheim
Ellie is much too pleased with herself for following an online tutorial to turn her Python code into a package. After graduation, she'll be working as an Electrical Engineer for Honeybee Robotics.
Zoe Worrall
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Jackson Philion
Jackson enjoyed working as the Hardware team lead for this project, particularly on the input board final design. After graduation in 2025, he's excited to pursue work in Electrical Engineering as a Digital Designer, PCB Designer, or Embedded Systems Engineer.
Cameron Hernandez
Cameron loved working with the Software team, primarily on implementing firmware logic that would handle different PVP sweeps. He's a part of the class of 2026 with a planned degree in General Engineering, specifically focusing towards electrical.
Isabella Hottenrott
Bella contributed to the software side of this project and has since pursued additional opportunities working with HDL. She is heading into her final year at Harvey Mudd College, where she plans to specialize in electrical engineering and embedded systems engineering.
Jessica Liu
Jessica has had so much fun learning new things in the Hardware team of this project, such as designing PCBs, working with hardware, and doing some mechanical design and implementation. She’s heading into her final year at Harvey Mudd College, pursuing a joint degree in Computer Science and Engineering, where she plans to specialize in electrical/hardware/embedded engineering.
Lucas Lemos
Lucas appreciated designing and testing creative solutions to the SPI demultiplexing problem. There's few satisfactions in EE greater than holding the freshly fabbed PCB you've poured hours of labor into. Lucas is entering his senior year focusing on electronics hardware and embedded systems.
Natalie Arce
Natalie worked on the hardware team where she enjoyed learning about PCB design for the output board and implemented mechanical supports for the DACs. She is entering her senior year at Harvey Mudd College where she will further explore interests in mechanical design and manufacturing processes.