Home Automation Systems
Home automation interests me because it brings systems thinking into everyday physical life.
What It Is
Circuits control current and voltage to perform computation, signaling, and power distribution across components and boards.
What This Domain Trains You To Notice
This domain is valuable because physical and infrastructure systems make constraints legible. They show how components fit together, where tolerance matters, how failure propagates, and what it takes to keep an assembly reliable over time.
Why It Transfers
The broader payoff is transfer. Once you learn to see interfaces, bottlenecks, and feedback in a physical substrate, you get better at spotting the same patterns in software, organizations, and markets. This domain gets more useful when it is compared with adjacent systems instead of being treated as a silo. That is where reusable judgment starts to form.
In Practice
Related Domains
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.
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.