Michael Znachonok

Aerospace & mechanical engineering · Dartmouth '30

Design.
Build.
Test.

Engineering student building and testing UAV hardware, CAD-driven prototypes, and flight-control software.

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  • Charlottesville, VA
  • Available Summer 2027
CAPSTONE UAV · FLIGHT-TESTED Isometric CAD render of a fixed-wing aircraft on a slate-gray background: a single long straight wing crosses a slim fuselage boom, with a tail assembly at one end and a rounded streamlined fuselage pod at the other.
Seven-foot fixed-wing capstone UAV — designed, built, bench- and flight-tested.

About

Portrait of Michael Znachonok, facing the camera in a blue-gray pinstriped collared shirt and black necktie, against a dense dark-green foliage background.

I am a Dartmouth Engineering Sciences student and founder of Talos Unmanned Systems. My work combines mechanical design, computational fluid dynamics, rapid fabrication, flight testing, and MAVLink-based software. I am most interested in hands-on aerospace and defense engineering roles where design decisions are tested against real hardware. Outside the lab, I row for the Dartmouth Men’s Heavyweight Crew Team.

  • Charlottesville, VA
  • Dartmouth Men’s Heavyweight Crew Team

Selected work

Hardware I’ve designed, built, and tested

A flight-tested UAV and the vacuum formers that made its skin, 3D-printed telescope replicas for Smithsonian displays, and the software and design studies around them.

  • Isometric CAD render of a fixed-wing aircraft on a slate-gray background: a single long straight wing crosses a slim fuselage boom, with a tail assembly at one end and a rounded streamlined fuselage pod at the other.
    COMPLETED · FLIGHT-TESTED

    Fixed-wing UAV

    A 7-foot-wingspan fixed-wing UAV designed, fabricated, and flight tested, with CFD-informed wing and airfoil choices and a 3D-printed, TPU-hinged V-tail.

    • SPAN 7 ft
    • AIRFOIL NACA 4412
  • Photo of the full-size vacuum former: a large foil-lined heater box raised on steel posts above a wide framed forming bed with a latched clamping frame.
    COMPLETED · BUILT & USED

    Vacuum formers

    A 2 × 4 ft vacuum former and an 18 × 18 in prototype built to form the capstone UAV's PETG skin, with a heater array of salvaged toaster elements designed to run within 10 A on a standard 120 V outlet.

    • FORMING AREA 2 × 4 ft
    • HEATER LIMIT 10 A
  • Isometric CAD render of a cylindrical space-telescope model on a slate-gray background, with a large hinged rectangular aperture door and two diagonal boom antennas extending from the mid-body.
    CLIENT WORK · COMPLETED

    Smithsonian telescope replicas

    As a CAD intern at Monster Fight Club, LLC, independently created or substantially reworked 12 Fusion 360 telescope models for Smithsonian Air and Space Museum hands-on displays.

    • CLIENT Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
  • ACTIVE R&D

    Talos Unmanned Systems

    Founder-led UAV R&D: a Python MAVLink mission-planning UI and C++ telemetry/logging tooling are built and tested; a LiDAR/RGB-D sensor platform on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI accelerator is in design.

  • Surface pressure coefficient rendered on a swept flying-wing aircraft in the GUI's 3D view: a pale blue-to-yellow gradient across the wing, with warmer colour concentrated on the nose and the wing leading edges, against a near-black background.
    INDEPENDENT PROJECT · SOFTWARE

    OpenFOAM® CFD simulation GUI

    An AI-assisted GUI for STL-based OpenFOAM simulation setup, configurable multi-core runs, and interactive 3D visualization of surface pressure and streamlines, used to analyze a winged aircraft at sea level and 50 m/s.

    • FLOW 50 m/s
    • CASE Incompressible
  • DESIGN STUDIES

    Design studies

    An opposed-output gearbox and a stepper-motor-driven rising platform, both 3D-printed, built, and working as intended, plus an exploratory flying-wing concept UAV designed in CAD and analyzed in CFD but not yet built.

Experience

Internship, R&D, and education

A full-time CAD internship delivering museum display models, an independent UAV venture, and engineering studies at Dartmouth.

  1. February 2026 – Present

    Founder & Independent UAV Developer

    Talos Unmanned Systems

    Built and tested a Python MAVLink mission-planning UI and C++ telemetry/logging tooling; designing a quadrotor R&D platform intended to integrate a LiDAR array, RGB-D camera, Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB), and AI accelerator.

  2. June 16 – August 14, 2026

    Computer-Aided Design Intern

    Monster Fight Club, LLC

    Full-time, on-site CAD internship producing 12 Fusion 360 telescope and component models for Smithsonian Air and Space Museum hands-on displays, from modeling through slicing, printing, and assembly.

  3. Expected June 2030

    B.A. Engineering Sciences

    Dartmouth College

    Pursuing coursework toward Dartmouth's B.E. program. Member of the Dartmouth Men’s Heavyweight Crew Team.

Skills

Design & analysis

  • Autodesk Fusion 360
  • Autodesk CFD
  • OpenFOAM
  • CAD/CAM

Fabrication & testing

  • FDM 3D printing
  • Resin (SLA) 3D printing
  • Bambu Studio
  • Vacuum forming
  • Laser cutting
  • UAV assembly and flight testing

Programming & systems

  • C++
  • Python
  • Java
  • MAVLink telemetry

AI tooling & workflow

  • Claude / Claude Code
  • OpenAI Codex
  • Prompt engineering
  • AI workflow design
  • Agent skill authoring
  • Multi-agent orchestration

Foreign language skills

  • Russian — advanced speaking, reading, writing

Certifications

AI workflow & agent tooling

I build and maintain a personal library of agent skills for Claude Code — versioned instruction packages that give a coding agent a specific working method, together with the eval harnesses that measure whether each one actually fires on the right prompts and stays quiet on the wrong ones. I use them to run my own engineering work, including the OpenFOAM CFD GUI.

Agent skills I have written
SkillWhat it doesStructure
honesty-broker Adversarial three-agent review. A pro advocate and a con advocate build the strongest honest case each way; an independent mediator that argued neither side returns a verdict with a confidence level and a checkable falsifier. Built to defeat sycophancy on consequential claims, with an evidence-tagging scheme that separates verified fact from inference and assumption. SKILL.md + advocate and mediator role files
management-chain Four-role agent organization — director, managers, workers, and independent reviewers — for builds too large or too correctness-critical for a single agent. The agent that writes code never approves it; a separate reviewer verifies before anything is called done, and the director audits integration across parts. SKILL.md + four role files
research-director Decomposes a topic into independent questions, dispatches scouts to do the retrieval, then synthesizes a citation-backed report with confidence levels, named conflicts between sources, and explicit gaps rather than smoothed-over guesses. SKILL.md + scout and verifier role files
effort-calibration A five-factor rubric — blast radius, ambiguity, solution-space search, coupling, verifiability — that scores a task into one of five model-and-effort bands before it is dispatched. Designed so that downgrading is a normal outcome: work with a narrow blast radius and an executable check is meant to come back cheap. SKILL.md + rubric and audit reference files
print-eject-timing Domain skill drawn from operating a print farm during my Monster Fight Club internship: given an STL, gcode, or Bambu 3MF file, predicts the bed release temperature at which a print can be automatically ejected, plus an estimated cooldown time. SKILL.md + eval fixtures

How I measure them

A skill that fires on the wrong prompt is worse than no skill, so each one ships an eval harness rather than an assurance. Every harness holds 20 realistic queries — 10 that should route to the skill and 10 near-miss negatives that deliberately share its vocabulary — judged at two model tiers. The negatives are the valuable half: they test the boundary against sibling skills. Prompts are generated from the live frontmatter by script and never retyped, so a measured rate always traces back to the exact text that produced it. A mechanical gate (check_budgets.py) checks frontmatter keys, character caps, and reference-file structure on every edit.

Trigger-routing accuracy, measured August 2026 (10 positives, 10 near-miss negatives)
SkillModel tierHit rateFalse-trigger rate
honesty-brokerHaiku10/100/10 (was 1/10)
management-chainSonnet10/10 (was 9/10)0/10
research-directorHaiku10/100/10
research-directorSonnet9/100/10

Get in touch

Open to Summer 2027 engineering internships. Reach out by email or LinkedIn, or download my résumé.

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