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.
What It Is
Systems manage production, materials, workflows, and capacity in physical goods environments.
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.
Related Domains
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.