Engineer / builder / designer
I'm obsessed with making functional designs that work in the real world. I'm interested in everything from mechanical design to electrical design to writing software. I like seeing systems come together into one coherent product that I can touch.
Fig. 01 — somewhere in SF01 / Selected work
Two projects I'm deep into right now. Both mix mechanical design, electronics, and software, and both are still very much in progress.
I built Air Buddy to track the air quality everywhere you go, both indoors and outdoors, then produce a heat map of the places you've been. It can also send you notifications if a room isn't properly ventilated or the CO₂ gets too high. The hardware is mostly finished, and right now I'm working on getting the software side done.
4-layer board · 1 oz copper
CADPad is a macro pad designed to be ergonomic and make CAD software easier to use. I got really sick of using keyboard shortcuts in Onshape and KiCad, so I built this to solve that problem. There are already a lot of macro pads out there, but none had the look and feel I wanted. Right now, I'm waiting on the PCB from the fab.
4-layer board · 1 oz copper
02 / About me, roughly
This is less of a résumé and more of a portrayal of things I got obsessed with.
I originally wanted to make 3D product animations and architectural renderings. Blender was the first software I dove DEEPLY into, and I learned how to model complex products and objects, such as laptops. This was also my first introduction to physics and physics simulations. I worked on a couple of projects involving fluid dynamics and rigid-body simulations and was immediately hooked—I wanted to learn more. The thing that always frustrated me about 3D animation, though, was that the models weren't precise. They were just modeled to look like the real thing, but the scales were arbitrary. I wanted to actually hold and see the things I was modeling in the real world, and be able to solve my problems using design. This is what later led me to mechanical design and engineering.
Over time, I realized that the math and physics behind the animations were what really interested me. I also wanted to be more than just good at CAD—I wanted to build things that could actually have an impact on the physical world. This led me to start learning algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, along with the basics of C++, Python, and electronics, since I knew they'd be crucial to building things down the line. I did all of this in my free time while I was still finishing my high school courses.
I started spending as much time as I could learning electronics, software, and engineering. Most days, I'd spend twelve or fourteen hours just working on projects and reading textbooks and datasheets. Not because I had to or because I made money off of it (I've never made a cent on any of my projects so far). I did it for a love of the game, and the hope that learning these skills will allow me to make a big impact on the world later on.
Still grinding every day and trying to become the best engineer I can be. Getting much better at assembling boards and soldering. I've also been super into studying physics lately. I tried to learn it about a year ago, but a lot of the concepts were hard to apply since the stuff I was building at that time wasn't that complex. Now that I've had some hands-on exposure, everything is making a lot more sense, and I've been loving it.
* dates are approximate. the rabbit holes were not.
KiCadEDA
JLCPCBPCB DFM & manufacturing
OnshapeMechE CAD
PrusaSlicer3D print slicing03 / Contact
