Justin Troth's Stuff

My Interests!

📗 Electrical and Computer Engineering Chips are magical objects. I wanted to know how the magic worked, so I chose Computer Engineering as my major. I was quite invested in the PC building space, and did a lot of overclocking as well.

My favorite place to learn about the hardware industry is Asionometry, on youtube.

As of Fall 2025, I'm taking VLSI Design 1, Robot Vision and Digital Design.

I aspire to one day be a verification or validation engineer.

This is a functional PCB business card which I designed in KiCad. When fully put together, it works as a temperature/humidity sensor with an on/off switch. It displays on a prebuilt OLED screen I2C. I've gone through quite a few iterations of this card. I was hoping to keep it very low profile, so I started with CR2032 button cell batteries. It turns out the internal resistance of these batteries is high enough that they can not provide enough current to the OLED screen's 7V boost converter to make it power on. I've moved towards two AA batteries, which also provide 3V, but are much larger. Still working on finalized code for the PIC24FJ64GA002. This card also features some test points and an iLED.
📘 Cities and transportation I love cities and trains and bikes and busses. As an American, I'm happy to be living in Minneapolis, one of the best cities in the US for getting around by bike.
📗 Japanese language I've been studying Japanese since I was 15 years old. I started off with Anki as a way to keep myself accountable to actually learning every day. Almost all of my learning has been through self study. I still use Anki, along with Migaku to create new flashcards. The fundamental idea is to find sentences where there is only one unknown word. If you can understand the rest of the sentence, you are more likely to infer meaning for the remaining word, making it easier to remember and recall.

This method is an uphill battle because you need to understand a reasonable amount of words before you can reliably find sentences with only one word missing. Nonetheless, I've found this method much more effective than using pre-built anki decks, since creating flashcards from sentences you find naturally is always going to be more memorable than slowly going through someone else's deck. It's because of this method that I was able to take the second most difficult Japanese language classes at Nagoya University while studying abroad.

Another principle I've followed is to rely overwhelmingly on input. I didn't even speak Japanese the first two years I was studying. This has been helpful for maintaining a good accent and large vocabulary, but means that I have little experience outputting Japanese. The classes I took in Nagoya definately helped, but without consistent practice those output skills begin to rust as well, so I'm working on ways that I can integrate talking or writing into my daily life.

I've found that as I've gotten better at Japanese, novels become more and more appealing as a method to learn. At first it was overwhelming due to the vast amount of words I was unfamiliar with, but with time the reading became quicker and the novels more engaging. I highly recommend starting to read rather than focusing on just video if you are at an intermediate level in Japanese.

Some novels I've read recently include:

  • 小川洋子の博士が愛した数式 (The Professor's Beloved Equation by Youko Ogawa)
  • 東野圭吾の容疑者ｘの献身 (The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino)
  • 湊かなえの告白 (Confessions by Minato Kanae)
  • 東野圭吾の白夜行 (Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino)
📘 Running Under construction.

Some of my favorite places!