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.
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
Making and Craft
Projects where hands meet materials — woodworking, electronics, mechanical assembly, and the satisfaction of building something that functions in the physical world.
Making the House Smarter
Projects wiring up the home with sensors, automation, lighting, audio, and climate systems — learning IoT and embedded hardware by living inside it.
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.
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.
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.
Robotics and Teaching
Projects building robots, mentoring students through FIRST Robotics, and creating the tools and environments that make hands-on learning possible.
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.