PTL Laser Fixture
Individual two-axis movement, 16-bit laser dimming resolution, wireless or cabled DMX control
b. team
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e.V - Brooklyn
Sixteen miniature lasers with individually-controllable pan, tilt, and beam
Books read in 2025
Previous years 
 Books read in 2024 
 Books read in 2023 
 Books read in 2022 
 Books read in 2021 
 Books read in 2020 
 Books read in 2019 
 Books read in 2018 
 Format 
 Title 
 Author 
 Genre 
 Date began - date finished 
 
 Critical Mass 
 Daniel Suarez 
 Science fiction 
 01/12 - 01/26 
 The Mercy of Gods 
 James S.…
Girl With Bubbles
108 rotating disco balls on acrylic strands in front of a 2m x 1.5m canvas
Ethernet DMX Controller rev. 4.0
The most recent revision of the networked DMX controller with many hardware and firmware upgrades
USB DMX Controller Pro rev. 4.0
Updated hardware and firmware for the USB DMX Controller series
PoE Protoype PCBs
Prototype PCBs for Power over Ethernet implementation
The esp-idf FreeRTOS port has a default tick rate of 100Hz and that's dumb

 
 
 
 What the menuconfig window looks like when setting the FreeRTOS tick rate 
 
 
 



 No matter how many esp-idf projects I create, I almost always wast time solving a bug that I eventually realize is simply from the low initial tick rate. 
 The FreeRTOS tick rate is the rate at which the RTOS performs one incremental tick, or “clock…
Ethernet Pixel Controller
A WLED-capable device for controlling various protocols of addressable LEDs
Quad Channel DMX Fader
Capacitive-touch-controlled fader and macro button DMX controller
Books read in 2024
Previous years 
 Books read in 2023 
 Books read in 2022 
 Books read in 2021 
 Books read in 2020 
 Books read in 2019 
 Books read in 2018 
 Format 
 Title 
 Author 
 Genre 
 Date began - date finished 
 
 Me Talk Pretty One Day 
 David Sedaris 
 Comedy / Short story 
 02/02 - 02/03 
 My Sisters Keeper 
 Fiction 
 Jodi…
Ankerklause PCB Ornament
The third installment of the PCB Christmas ornament projects
Blinder Wall
A DMX-controlled, 1.5m x 1.5m square of warm incandescent lamps supporting different effects for live shows
Using a drill with fine-precision screwdrivers

 
 
 
 A precision screwdriver locked into a standard hand drill 
 
 
 



 I find myself needing to screw or unscrew many small screws quite frequently. Most of the time it’s screw terminals or some other small electrical device, but this also applies to things like eyeglasses or repairing things with small assemblies. 
 If the…
Mini DMX Patcher
A small PCB to implement custom DMX patching for a fixture in an existing universe of DMX
Capacitive Touch Protoype PCBs
Prototype PCBs for custom capacitive touch button and slider footprint testing
USB DMX Controllers
Two different devices for controlling DMX fixtures over a USB connection
Ethernet DMX Controller
Three revisions of a bidirectional ethernet/DMX/pixel controller with support for powering medium fixtures
lwIP PPP mode is not enabled by default in esp-idf
I recently implemented a cellular-network-connected device driven by an ESP32 as the main microcontroller with an external cellular modem controlled by AT commands for a client. This implementation leveraged several of the esp-idf SDK built-in components within the firmware, including their lwIP port. 
 lwIP , which stands for “Lightweight IP”, is an embedded-focused TCP/IP stack…
Low Res
Wall-mounted lighting display covering six square meters with addressable LED cubes
Books read in 2023
Previous years 
 Books read in 2022 
 Books read in 2021 
 Books read in 2020 
 Books read in 2019 
 Books read in 2018 
 Format 
 Title 
 Author 
 Genre 
 Date began - date finished 
 
 Station 11 
 Emily St. John Mandel 
 Dystopian fiction 
 01/03 
 Sea of Tranquility 
 Emily St. John Mandel 
 Science fiction 
 01/05 -…
Berghain PCB Ornament
The second installment of the PCB Christmas ornament projects
Light Valve Grid
A free-hanging grid of individually-addressable squares of glass whose opacity can be controlled remotely
When changing the size of the FreeRTOS timer queue somehow breaks the CAN bus
This writeup describes my debug process after finding a main feature of our device broken, diagnosing the problem, and finally hunting down the cause almost a week later. To no one’s surprise, the solution was a change to a single line of code. 
 My approach to debugging is to slowly chip away at small bits of uncertainty to reduce the problem to the smallest possible
number of…
Grounding a multimeter to a benchtop supply for voltage measurement
Many people who read this will probably roll their eyes at how obvious it is, but someone shared this tip with me recently for using a multimeter on a board powered by a benchtop supply that I found very useful. 
 The typical setup would be to power the PCB from the supply and measure different voltages on the board using both leads of the multimeter. Unless you’re trying to measure…
Books read in 2022
Previous years 
 Books read in 2021 
 Books read in 2020 
 Books read in 2019 
 Books read in 2018 
 Format 
 Title 
 Author 
 Genre 
 Date began - date finished 
 
 Going Postal 
 Terry Pratchett 
 Fiction 
 01/08 - 1/16 
 Ancillary Sword 
 Ann Leckie 
 Science fiction 
 01/14 - 01/23 
 Ancillary Mercy 
 Ann Leckie…
Donut PCB ornament
A small, donut-shaped Christmas ornament with LEDs and IR motion sensing
Spot Check pt. VI
Large firmware and enclosure update to support the new rev. 3 and 3.1 hardware
.gdbinit errors are annoyingly hard to spot
I wasted almost an hour of my time recently trying to figure out how to configure a home directory .gdbinit file. It’s been some time since I had to set up a new firmware project to debug with GDB, but I figured I could just copy the .gdbinit file from a working past project to the new project directory to do basic GDB setup scoped specifically to that directory. The only commands I needed…
Spot Check pt. V
Schematic capture, layout, and build of rev 3 and 3.1 boards for the Spot Check project to integrate battery power, e-ink display, and more
Reverse engineering a 15-year-old medical bed control system
Adding remote serial control of a large medical platform by reverse engineering the output and control signals of the joystick unit
Books read in 2021
Previous years 
 Books read in 2020 
 Books read in 2019 
 Books read in 2018 
 Format 
 Title 
 Author 
 Genre 
 Date began - date finished 
 
 Red Rising 
 Pierce Brown 
 Science Fiction 
 1/09 -1/16 
 Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain 
 Bruce Tremper 
 Educational 
 1/16 - 1/23 
 Golden Son 
 Pierce Brown 
 Science…
e-ink display driver board
Schematic capture, layout, and build of a breakout/driver PCB to drive generic 39-pin e-ink displays with any microcontroller
Morse Mountains workbench design and build
A plywood sheet routed with a ShopBot CNC in a pattern depicting a text message rendered in Morse code, then filled in with lasercut acrylic
Laser cut audio pt. II
Adding support for drawing complex shapes and tracing existing images with audio data
Spot Check pt. IV
Schematic capture, layout, and build of rev 2 PCB for the Spot Check project
If you're going to use a 3rd-party recruiter, be upfront about it
I was contacted by the CTO of a small (~10 person) startup recently over email. That’s not super typical; usually it’s an email or two every day from LinkedIn recruiters for different tech companies, but it’s not entirely unheard of. A lot of small to mid-size companies will let their HR and recruiting run their C-suites’ LinkedIn accounts so it seems like you’re…
Iterations on the humble to-do list
I’m honestly shocked I get anything done. 
 I don’t have a problem with procrastination or motivation, but my short-term memory is so bad that sometimes it astounds me. Don’t even get me started on trying to remember people’s names right after they introduce themselves to me. 
 I started keeping a written to-do list sometime around the beginning of university. It…
Lineup List
Generate a customized Spotify playlist from a music festival lineup
Laser cut audio
Laser cutting audio waveforms in varying shapes and designs
Spot Check pt. III
Firmware rewrite with heaps of new functionality, enclosure design and construction for the Spot Check project
Different soldering iron tips for desoldering

 
 
 
 U6, the part to be replaced 
 
 
 



 I recently had to do some light rework on some boards for my job. We had a 4 megabyte EEPROM IC that we were using for a tiny bit of non-volatile state storage, but mostly just to dump logs during development and testing of the product. We wanted to see if we could drop in a smaller, cheaper part for the…
Ikon Reservation Notifier
A notification system to email users when their specified resort and date had an open Ikon Pass reservation opening
Shaping a midlength single-fin surfboard
Designing, shaping, and glassing a new board, from foam blank to finish
Books read in 2020

 New York 2140 
 Kim Stanley Robinson 
 Fiction 
 1/1 - 1/16 
 
 The Imposter’s Handbook 
 Rob Conery 
 Educational 
 1/17 - 1/24 
 
 The Soul of a New Machine 
 Tracy Kidder 
 Non-fiction 
 1/19 - 1/21 
 
 The Handmaid’s Tale 
 Margaret Atwood 
 Dystopian fiction 
 1/28 - 2/1 
 
 Making Embedded…
Autodesk's Pier 9 workshop

 
 
 
 Front door of the Pier 9 workshop. Credit holmesfire.com 
 
 
 



 Autodesk has one of the greatest employee perks that I’ve ever seen. 
 Not the unlimited vacation policy. 
 Not the cool, comfy, decked-out offices. 
 Not even the annual worldwide soccer tournament (which, honestly, is a super rad perk too). 
 In my…
Failing the interview but getting the job
When PlanGrid reached out to me regarding an open position, I was almost done with my senior year of university and had a job offer in-hand for a company located in Washington DC. Most of my job search had been concentrated on the West coast since that was where I’m from, and I was trying hard to end up in San Francisco. I had visited SF a few times during an internship the summer before and…
Surfboard bike rack
A rack created from PVC piping, wooden dowels, and some foam to carry my surfboard alongside my bike
Spot Check pt. II
Custom PCB schematic capture, layout / routing, assembly, and testing for the Spot Check project
Startup script for tmux session
A while back I was converted from using OS tabs in the macOS Terminal to tmux , a terminal multiplexer (hence the name). This gives the ability to have multiple sessions (terminal sessions), windows (terminal tabs), and panes within a single window (no stock counterpart), among many other things. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m fairly efficient in it, but I’m sure there are a…