Workshop
Things that get built
I keep printers, needles, and a soldering iron in roughly the same room. These are the hobbies that produce an object at the end.
3D printing
I run a dual-nozzle enclosed machine with a heated chamber for the serious work. I also keep a small bedslinger that still earns its shelf space. The interesting part is not the printing, it is the calibration.
- Filament profiling and flow calibration
- Multi-material and multi-color prints
- Functional parts: organizers, fixtures, brackets, jigs
- Parametric bin and insert generation for drawer systems
Fur, foam, and fabric
Costume construction is engineering with a nap direction. I pattern to fit a real head, carve foam to a shape that reads well from three meters away, and then tuft fur so the seams disappear.
- Head patterning and foam carving
- Fur tufting and seam hiding
- Machine sewing on a mechanical Singer
- Hand finishing where the machine cannot reach
Soldering and rework
I work with a portable iron, a hot plate, and a lot of patience. Most of the work is small. This includes reflowing LED emitters onto MCPCBs (metal core printed circuit boards), replacing connectors, and rescuing things that were declared dead.
- Emitter desoldering and reflow on metal core boards
- Connector and wire repair
- Firmware flashing on driver boards
- Board-level diagnosis before parts get ordered
Flashlight modding
This is the hobby that quietly became a research project. I swap the emitter, flash better firmware, and then argue about optics. Reflectors, TIR (total internal reflection) lenses, and aspheric lenses each lie to you in a different way.
- Emitter swaps for output, tint, or throw
- Advanced open-source UI firmware
- Reflector, TIR, and aspheric beam behavior compared side by side
- In progress: a dual-emitter host with two independent channels
Cells and chargers
Lithium-ion cells are the most interesting component in any of this gear. They are also the component most often treated as a black box. A four-channel analyzing charger turns the marketing numbers into measured ones.
- Capacity and internal resistance testing
- Cell selection for high-drain versus runtime
- Safe charging practice and cell care
- Building and testing custom packs
Home automation
I run a local-first smart home on a self-hosted hub, with sensors that report to a dashboard instead of to a cloud service. Half the fun is modifying cheap consumer hardware until it speaks the right protocol.
- Self-hosted automation hub
- ESP32 sensor nodes, including retrofit builds
- Addressable LED lighting with open firmware
- Printer, air quality, and power monitoring
Build log
Open projects
- Dual-emitter host. Two LED types run on two channels from one battery, and the driver selection is the current bottleneck.
- Maximum-output headlamp. The host is stock and everything inside it has been replaced, as far as the thermals allow.
- Drawer organization system. The bins are parametric and sized to one specific set of drawers, so they are generated rather than modeled by hand.
- Air quality sensor retrofit. A cheap consumer particulate sensor gets a microcontroller and a way to report what it sees.
- Suit parts. This one is ongoing, and it has been ongoing for a while.