Projects

I love working with the Pi Pico / RP2040 microcontroller, but setting up the pico SDK can be a bit of a pain in the butt, especially while hopping across a few separate devices and operating systems (as I was for a while). After a few years of messing around with it, I’ve settled onContinue…

Quick Stats: After our DMV themed Halloween costume last year, our Halloween crew was searching for a new costume idea that would be equally frightening for both children and adults. In March 2023, we had our answer. What’s Silicandy Valley Bank? In the months before Halloween, we began planning our costume with a rather ambitiousContinue…

Background In the course of home-etching a bunch of PCBs, I’ve spent many hours hunched over my drill press squinting at tiny drill bits and trying to line them up with pads for vias and through holes. These pads can be quite small: the smallest rivets I use have a pad size / head diameterContinue…

My most recent design challenge was building a remote load switch for a hypothetical aerospace application. I formed and documented a design through schematic capture, simulation, and hardware layout, but stopped short of routing the PCB and sending things out on an initial prototype run. The simulations look good and most of the design isContinue…

I recently came upon design challenge for designing a single-cell battery simulator. I started having a lot of fun with the project–by the time it was done, I figured it was worth documenting as a good example of my hardware and software design workflow. As of the time of writing this post, I’m quite happyContinue…

As of the time of writing this post, I’ve been chasing the dream of etching circuit boards at home for at least four years. After flopping around between various techniques for years (including CNC milling with two separate machines and lots of mods), I think that I’ve finally settled on a techniqe that is lowContinue…

For Halloween 2022, we wanted to top our previous record attempt for “Most Complicated Way to Make Trick-Or-Treaters Suffer in a Haunted Maze of Endless Bureaucracy”, and settled on the perfect idea: the DMV. With some slight candy-adjacent-holiday themed rebranding, ten yards of cubicle fabric, over $1k in off-theshelf and government-surplus IT equipment, and aContinue…

I’ve always enjoyed cooking, especially Asian food (lots of influence from my mom’s side of the family in Wuhan) and slow-smoked barbecue (idk it’s tasty). One day in the summer of 2021, Caitlin (my Significant Other), Kenneth (my brother), and I stumbled into a strange cocktail of boredom and hubris and decided to start aContinue…

Electronics Kit Now Available! Update 2023-09-05: I finally got around to redesigning the electronics for this kit, and got some PCBs made for an improved 7-segment display as well as a new control board based on a Pi Pico! I also rewrote the firmware in MicroPython to make it easier to play around with. TheContinue…

This bird is so dumb that it laid an egg on one (1) stick. We built it a tupperware out of wood, so watch it have kids now I guess.

Why did you make this cursed rectangle? It’s a pretty iconic vignette of 21st century living: you’re checking out of the grocery store, and the cashier lines are long. You glance down the row of checkout stands, and the unoccupied self-checkout kiosk beckons from across the store, willing you to try it out just oneContinue…

After learning about the PIC12F752 in a mechatronics class, I was tempted to use the cheap microcontroller to play music. The device has 1024 Bytes of program memory, but only 64 Bytes of flash, making storing a song in data memory very difficult. Instead, I hacked together a code generation program in Python that wouldContinue…

I decided to build a bird feeder with a live-streaming camera for my significant other’s birthday. It seems to work pretty well! The system is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W running the Motion firmware, with an image mask and motion trigger set to activate when birds land on the feeder. Every night, aContinue…

Overview After building my 3D printer enclosure, I ran into the issue of my printer enclosure getting too warm. Temperatures during extended prints were climbing above 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which was causing my printer electronics to overheat, leading to extrusion issues and missed steps. I remedied this by propping the door open with a rag,Continue…

Overview This is my second iteration of my LED trumpet.  The first iteration used an Arduino Nano, but I upgraded to a Teensy this time around for more processing power (gotta get all them FFT’s).  The system is powered by Lipo batteries (from my rc aircraft projects) feeding a Castle 10A SBEC that provides 5VContinue…

I got bored during finals and measured the fire alarm pull outside my dorm room.  Adding a slot to the back allowed me to fit it over my room’s existing light switches, and a dual-color print from PETG gave it a somewhat realistic look.  Shenanigans ensued. Thingiverse Link