Every engineer has (at least one) drawer, box, or shelf that slowly becomes a resting place for cables, adapters, chargers, and connectors whose original purpose is half-remembered at best. Mine is no exception. And I fully understand how irrational it is. On paper, it makes no sense. Most of these things are obsolete, redundant, or [ ]
A few weeks ago, the power button on my air conditioner remote started acting up. At first it needed a harder press. Then a firmer press. Eventually I found myself jabbing at it repeatedly like I was trying to negotiate with the remote rather than operate it. The rest of the buttons worked perfectly, so [ ]
A few days ago, a friend showed me how he uses Claude AI to generate reports about his online store. Some of the insights were straightforward, things you could easily get from a pivot table, like which color or size sells the most. Others were more involved, like figuring out how many orders come from [ ]
I was building a small gadget: a blinking light activated by a magnet hidden inside a princess wand. I sketched out a simple NE555 timer circuit and verified the design on a breadboard. Everything worked perfectly. Since I only needed a few units, fabricating a PCB felt like overkill—too expensive and too slow to ship. [ ]
Many years ago, I was sending high altitude balloons to the sky with cameras attached. I wanted them to broadcast these images live to the ground. The solution I used was analog SSTV which ham with good antennas could receive. I also experimented with digital images over APRS. The idea was to decentralize the reception [ ]
Whether you are a seasoned maker or just starting out with laser cutting, there is a universal moment of tension: hitting Start on a job and hoping the laser follows the path you actually intended. One wrong setting or a miscalculated offset can lead to wasted material or, worse, a ruined project. To solve this, [ ]
A friend came to me one day with a wonderfully strange request. She wanted a magic mirror. Not just any mirror, but that mirror.You know the one: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The idea was simple and slightly mischievous:when someone stands in front of the mirror, it recognizes who [ ]
I ve got some pet projects pilling up, so I ve decided to write about them. first one on the list is a pedestrian traffic light my friend found and wanted to do something cool with it. his idea was just to make the light blink, but I wanted something more exciting and if possible, interactive. since [ ]
Over the past year, it’s been impossible to ignore the hype around AI coding tools. Headlines promised that AI tools would “redefine programming” and “let developers focus only on ideas, not code.” Friends and colleagues were raving about how AI was writing entire components for them in seconds. Naturally, I wanted to see for myself [ ]
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been putting focused effort into something engineers rarely talk about out loud: marketing myself. After more than 25 years working in embedded systems — building firmware, debugging hardware, leading teams, and running companies — I’ve shifted my focus to freelance work. My goal: help teams and startups go from [ ]