These are the self-directed projects, experiments, practices, and rabbit holes that shaped how I think long before they had any business case. Most of them started the same way: I wanted to understand how something actually worked, what reality would say once it was built, or what changed when I got close enough to see the constraints for myself.
This section matters because it shows the through-line behind the broader body of work. The domains vary: homelabs, robotics, radio systems, home automation, movement, music, philosophy, craft, and other forms of exploration. But the pattern is consistent: get close to the system, build something real, learn from the constraints, and keep refining until what is true becomes clearer.
The projects on the business side of this site show where that instinct operated under external stakes: clients, teams, deadlines, budgets, and outcomes that had to hold up in the real world. This section shows the personal proving grounds behind that work. It is less about hobbies as inventory and more about the environments where curiosity, judgment, patience, and hands-on capability were built.
If you want the client-facing body of work, go to Projects for Work. If you want the self-directed layer that helped shape how I build, this section is that part of the map.
- Aikido in Practice Aikido matters to me as both a physical practice and a way of studying connection, balance, timing, and response.
- AWS DeepLens — Computer Vision for the House Used AWS DeepLens in 2018 to estimate the real cost of adding ML-powered visual awareness to a home automation system — and arrived at an honest 'not yet, not cheaply' answer worth having.
- Building with Tools and Materials Working with tools and materials has been part of how I learn to build since junior high shop class first set me on that path.
- Computer Vision & Control Model for Robot (NI Vision + LabVIEW) A vision-based robot control system using National Instruments hardware and LabVIEW — the robot sees, decides, and acts — with lessons that transferred directly to later data pipeline and real-time processing work.
- Conscious Shala Speaker System — Design, Installation, and Tuning Designed, installed, and tuned a proper audio system for a local yoga and meditation studio — speaker selection, placement modeling, and acoustic tuning for even coverage in a specific room.
- Experiences That Shaped Me This page is for experiences that left a lasting mark on how I think, feel, or move through the world. 1
- FIRST Robotics FRC VPN for On-Device Testing Built a VPN system for remote programming and testing of actual FRC RoboRIO hardware — not a simulator — and learned as much about networking latency as robotics in the process.
- Fitness, Movement, and Competition Movement matters to me because physical life affects mental life more than many people admit.
- Food, Places, and Exploration Food and place are some of the most immediate ways I experience the world.
- Home Automation Systems Home automation interests me because it brings systems thinking into everyday physical life.
- Homelab and Infrastructure My homelab is both a workshop and a proving ground. 1
- HVAC 'Space Pants' — Atrium Cooling Designed and tested a DIY HVAC solution for an unresolved third-floor heating and cooling problem using 12-inch ducts and AC Infinity inline fans — before a full system replacement validated the approach.
- Incense I was introduced to incense as something to study, and that framing changed how I saw it.
- Kitchen LED Lights The third room in the Magnolia LED rollout, introducing physical constraints around heat, grease, and the need for actually useful task lighting.
- LabVIEW Data Acquisition — Solar Thermal Electric Panel A LabVIEW and CompactRIO data acquisition system to measure a novel Solar Thermal Electric Panel against commercial systems — results published on ResearchGate.
- Laser & Alarm System An early DIY security prototype — a laser beam, a photoresistor, and a circuit to trigger an alarm — built before smart home meant buying a subscription.
- LED Backpack A portable, wearable LED display built into a backpack — same individually addressable technology as the house projects, but with battery power, outdoor visibility, and durability constraints.
- LED Baseboard Lights — Bedroom Soft baseboard lighting using the WLED ecosystem that shifts color temperature through the day — and revealed that bedroom smart lighting has near-zero tolerance for latency.
- LED Lights — Office (WLED & WS2812b) Individually addressable LED strips controlled by ESP8266/ESP32 running WLED, integrated with Apple HomeKit and Home Assistant to respond to time of day, calendar events, and sensor data.
- LEGO Builds and Models LEGO has been part of how I think, learn, and express ideas since I was young.
- LEGO-Based Standard Robot Testing Framework A standardized test robot built from LEGO for repeatable, reconfigurable multi-motion and vision testing — because having a reliable test platform is the difference between debugging code and debugging hardware at the same time.
- Light Suit with Camera A full-body wearable LED suit — programmable, camera-equipped, and built entirely by hand — that taught more about power budgets, wearable ergonomics, and heat dissipation than any datasheet.
- Mint Finance Organization Built personal data infrastructure years before that was a phrase — automated transaction imports across all accounts, evolving through Mint, Monarch, QuickBooks, Fivetran, and Postgres after the 2024 sunset.
- Music: Creation and Influence Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
- NI RoboRIO — LabVIEW, C++, and Java Programming Multi-language robotics programming across NI hardware for FRC mentorship — maintaining parallel codebases for the same robot behaviors to understand what's universal versus what's a language artifact.
- Philosophy and the Study of Existence I return to philosophy, religion, poetry, and art as a living reference library for the human experience — using them as tools for seeing, not as abstract decoration.
- Photo Sharing Site — Self-Hosted Built and ran a self-hosted photo sharing platform before cloud storage made it trivial — covering web dev, storage, auth, and the enduring question of how to make a growing photo library actually useful.
- Photos on Amazon Echo Devices A system for syncing and displaying family photos across Echo Show devices — where the hard problem turned out to be curation, not display.
- Praxis — The Magnolia Homelab A 4-node Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, Ceph, site-to-site VPNs to AWS, GitOps pipelines, and a full observability stack — built to test every architecture I recommend to clients.
- Quantified Self The quantified self interests me as a way of observing patterns in a life that would otherwise blur together. 1
- Radio Control Systems Radio control systems have interested me since I was young — where communication, control, and motion all come together.
- Radio Systems and Exploration Radio systems are interesting to me for both personal and technical reasons.
- Remote Lab for Teaching LabVIEW (Google Meet + AWS Workspaces) Built a remote learning environment during the pandemic so students could access LabVIEW software and physical lab hardware from anywhere — keeping a robotics program running when everything else shut down.
- Robotics (FIRST, FRC, and Beyond) Robotics brings together many of the things I care about most: building, learning, teamwork, mentorship, and the joy of making complex systems real.
- Self Beacon Tracking (iBeacon) Experimented with iBeacon transmitters placed around the house to track room-by-room location before indoor positioning was a product category.
- Speakers on the Wall Corners High-mounted corner speakers wired through the walls for whole-floor surround sound — and a lesson in how ceiling-height placement changes a room's sound field.
- Van Power Issue Diagnosed and fixed an electrical fault in the van by tracing wiring and testing circuits — a small project that illustrates how the same diagnostic thinking applies to a Kubernetes cluster and a 12-volt system alike.
- WiFi Security Research — ESP8266 & Rotating MAC Addresses A proof of concept using ESP8266 microcontrollers to demonstrate that rotating MAC addresses can still be fingerprinted via broadcast SSIDs.