I design &
build systems
that work.

When the rear hub motor on my Totem Volcano electric mountain bike started showing intermittent power loss and grinding, I decided to tear it down myself rather than send it out for service. The goal was to understand exactly what failed and do a full motor swap.

The teardown involved removing the rear wheel, cracking open the hub motor casing, and inspecting the stator windings, magnets, and hall effect sensors. I found heat damage on two of the three hall sensors and signs of demagnetization on several rotor magnets — likely from sustained hill climbing under heavy load.

I sourced a replacement motor with matching KV rating and bolt pattern, rewired the phase leads and hall sensor harness to the existing controller, and verified correct commutation sequence before reassembly. The whole process required careful attention to the motor-to-controller protocol, phase order, and mechanical alignment within the dropout.

Built a custom steering wheel button controller using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. The system reads physical button inputs via GPIO using libgpiod and broadcasts state changes over both CAN bus (for vehicle integration) and Unix domain sockets (for a local Qt-based HMI receiver).

The architecture went through several iterations — starting with threaded approaches before settling on a poll()-based event loop for deterministic timing and lower overhead. The Unix socket layer evolved from SOCK_STREAM to SOCK_DGRAM with a client registration model to support multiple listeners without blocking.

The CAN bus integration required careful frame packing and timing to coexist with other ECUs on the bus without causing collisions or timing violations.

Designed and built a physical MBTA transit map with individually addressable WS2812B LED strips representing each line — Red, Orange, Blue, and Green. Approximately 350 LEDs are mapped to station positions on a wall-mounted board.

An ESP32 microcontroller drives the strips, handling the precise timing requirements of the WS2812B protocol across multiple data lines. The PCB was custom designed to distribute power cleanly across long LED runs while minimizing voltage drop at the far ends of each line.

Designed a servo-actuated TicTac dispenser from scratch in SolidWorks, using a rack and pinion mechanism driven by an SG90 micro servo. The gear train uses module 2.0 involute tooth profiles with calculated pitch diameters and deliberate backlash to account for FDM printing tolerances.

The dispenser reliably ejects a single TicTac per actuation cycle. Getting the gear mesh right for 3D printing required multiple test prints to dial in tooth clearance, since FDM layer lines and slight warping can bind gears that work perfectly in CAD.

Built an automated watering system for my spider plant using an Arduino Nano. The system uses a DS3231 RTC for scheduled watering intervals, a capacitive soil moisture sensor to prevent overwatering, and a small OLED display showing current status and next scheduled run.

A logic-level MOSFET switches a 5V peristaltic pump. Getting everything to fit within the Nano's 2KB of SRAM required careful memory optimization — moving strings to PROGMEM and minimizing library overhead.

Developed a real-time object detection system running on a Raspberry Pi that identifies shoes and socks in a camera feed. The model was trained using Roboflow's annotation and training pipeline with a YOLO architecture, then deployed for edge inference.

The system processes live video frames and draws bounding boxes with confidence scores, classifying detected footwear by type. Optimizations were needed to maintain usable frame rates on the Pi's limited compute.

Implemented motor control software for a Terasic Spider Robot using the DE1-SoC's dual ARM Cortex-A9 / Cyclone V FPGA architecture. Wrote a C++ SpiderLeg class that abstracts individual servo control through memory-mapped FPGA registers.

The FPGA handles real-time PWM generation for multiple servo channels while the ARM processor runs the higher-level gait logic and sequencing. Communication between the two happens through the HPS-to-FPGA bridge with direct register reads and writes.

Built a smart door peephole replacement using a Raspberry Pi Zero W2 and PiCamera module. The system runs a Flask server that captures live video frames using PiCamera2 and OpenCV, encoding them as MJPEG and serving them over HTTP with basic authentication.

The Pi streams directly to a local display using mpv rendering to the framebuffer via DRM — no desktop environment needed. A systemd service handles auto-start on boot with a timed delay to let the network come up first.

For remote access, the feed is tunneled through Cloudflare Tunnel, providing secure HTTPS access from anywhere without exposing the Pi's local network or opening router ports. The whole stack runs headless on Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

Designed and built an interactive roller coaster engineering failure simulation as a STEM outreach project for 5th grade students. The experience casts students as engineering investigators who must diagnose what went wrong with a roller coaster by working through a series of hands-on diagnostic stations.

The physical setup uses a laser-cut track with an ESP32 microcontroller driving the logic. Each station presents a different type of engineering check — students make physical wire connections to restore power circuits, use IR sensors to verify track alignment, monitor ultrasonic sensors for clearance detection, and adjust potentiometers to dial in safe operating speeds. RGB LEDs and an LCD display provide real-time feedback as students progress.

The project was built collaboratively by a college student team and delivered at local elementary schools as part of a volunteer STEM education program.

Designed and fabricated a knee hockey net from metal round tubing, welded together from scratch. The frame uses standard dimensions (roughly 18" wide, 12" tall, 12" deep) with bent bottom skid bars that curve outward along the floor — matching the geometry of real hockey nets.

The build involved cutting tubing to length, mitering joints for clean fits, tack welding the frame square, and running full beads on all corners. The bottom tubes were bent to create the characteristic peg/skid shape that keeps the net from sliding during play.

This was a hands-on fabrication project focused on learning welding technique — joint prep, heat management on thin-wall tubing, and keeping the frame from warping during assembly.

Built a custom button box controller for FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) to improve operator control during the 2025 Reefscape game. The controller uses an Arduino programmed as a USB HID (Human Interface Device) so the driver station recognizes it as a standard joystick — no special drivers needed.

Each physical button and switch on the box maps to a specific robot function — arm positions, intake/outtake, climb sequences — giving the operator dedicated tactile controls instead of hunting for keyboard shortcuts or sharing a gamepad. The layout was designed around the specific mechanisms and scoring actions in Reefscape.

The enclosure was designed and 3D printed to fit the button layout ergonomically, with labeled switches and a clean wiring harness inside. The Arduino handles debouncing and sends HID reports over USB to the driver station laptop.