I decided to rewrite this blog to migrate from Jekyll and a bunch of hand written HTML+CSS to SvelteKit+Bulma. Here’s some notes. (Image shamelessly borrowed from Svelte.dev)

A silly little game I created to try out web development. Write your own lunar lander autopilot and see if you can land on the moon!

I recently switched my server to zfs on root (still haven’t decided if it was really worth it but that’s another post). I quickly found that the Docker zfs storage driver seems to suck a lot.

This is the EggBot, my final project for ECEN 5613 - Embedded System Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It’s a massively overkill robot for cooking the perfect soft boiled egg (and also making tea).

The laser is finally cutting! I got all the last details together, aligned the mirrors, and got Machinekit properly configured.

The Smoothie is dead, long live the… whatever comes next. Some crappy wire fried my control board so now I’ve got to get a new solution.

The laser has basically sat in my tiny apartment for the last three years in Los Angeles. Now that I’ve left my job for graduate school, I finally have the time and space to work on the laser again. The laser is nearing completion and a few big things have changed since the last time I worked on it.

Holy smokes! Working motion control on my laser with the Smoothieboard! Click through, there is a video.

Magnetic door interlock switch! this stops the laser from burning your eyeballs out when you open the door. It’s also a required piece of equipment for a class 4 laser. This is an update on my laser.

Inspired by the Paulding Hammer my friend Michael and I decided it would be a fun project to make our own machinist’s hammers. Here I’ll cover the design and manufacturing plan.

Someone across the street from my apartment left out this perfectly awesome rear projection TV with a “bad bulb”. After it sat there for about a week, I decided to haul it over to my place and take it apart. Old products are a goldmine of random interesting parts, and a great opportunity to take a look at design and manufacturing.

My final project for my Mechatronics course at Cal Poly. We (myself and Colton Crivelli) had to build an Nerf gun that could autonomously find and shoot an incandescent bulb mounted to a square piece of wood. The project was titled “Learn by Duelling” since our turrets would compete against each other in duels, and Cal Poly’s motto is “Learn by Doing” (hardy har har).

My senior project for my Mechanical Engineering degree. A parabolic deployable antenna for CubeSats to provide Ka band transmission from beyond low earth orbit.

I picked up a bit of a foosball habit over the summer, and I really wanted to play at school. There aren’t any good tables around, so I waited and pounced on one on Craigslist.

Sous Vide means something in French. PID means proportional, integral, derivative in Engineer. Here’s a little Sous Vide controller I made for my Mom for Christmas this year. It’s a Ebay controller, SSR, and a outlet stuffed in a softball trophy case from the Container Store.

My biggest and craziest project so far! A 90 watt CO₂ laser cutter with a 2 by 4 ft work area driven by a smoothieboard and steppers.

This is a pretty cool example of how 3D printing is helpful in my day to day projects. It’s always useful to be able to produce a huge variety of geometries accurately and quickly with little to no effort on my part. I redesigned this spacer slightly to accommodate a different model of Audi than it was intended for, printed it to check dimensions, and then made it in metal.

A friend of mine was building a 6x6x6 LED Cube for a class project. He needed some help with a board for the cube, and contacted me because he knew I had made boards.

Ah, the N64 controller. An exercise in learning. I’ll be straight with you, I didn’t do this right. I started this project at a time when I didn’t know all that much about what I was doing. But I think it was the best possible way for me to jump in and learn a lot all at once. But as a learning experience, it was full of errors. Lets go down the list.

The printer lacked rigidity and would wobble while it ran. This is no good for me. It also made quite a racket, just enough to be heard in my bedroom which meant no late night prints.

A while back (almost 2 years actually) I decided that I’d like to play emulated N64 games on my computer. Of course this wouldn’t be possible without a real N64 controller, as I refuse to use either a keyboard or a PS3 controller - the easy way out. I decided I had to make a controller to use with my computer.

My Dad got himself a 1988 Jeep Wrangler YJ, with a yucky old dash. He wanted to go for a more flat and clean look, so I installed this custom dashboard.

I ran my Mini Kossel on a marathon print for 16 hours and found out after that my motors can run a little hot when they warped their plastic mounts.

This is my first big project! My Mini Kossel delta 3d printer.

I got this little red glider from Hobby King for Christmas, and it sparked a bit of a mini hobby for me.

On the quest to make my own circuit boards by the toner transfer method, I immediately realized that the standard iron would not cut it. So I purchased this laminator on craigslist for $20 to modify.

The Chainless Challenge bike I worked on in 2014 utilizing hydraulic cylinders needed a custom keyed hub. This is the story of how I machined a bike hub from steel billet.

Turns out that making a hydraulic powered bike is a crazy idea. A crazy bad idea.