My house didn’t have a doorbell when I moved in so I made my own! Instead of the traditional “ding dong” it plays a jingle written by my friend Nick Dahlquist throughout my house on Google Home devices.

The doorbell button is attached to an ESP32 which is connected to my WiFi. I also setup a few Docker containers on a Raspberry Pi to help with the automation.

Sure, it looks and acts like a sewing box but it’s actually a portable electronics laboratory!

I don’t have a permanent workspace at home so I find myself working at my dining room table and packing up my in progress projects often.

My friend asked me to help her make a bread shaping table because the small kitchen from which she runs Revelry Bread didn’t have counter space at a good height for kneading.

She had an great 74” x 24” hardwood IKEA table top and just needed a study frame so I built one out of some premium pine.

Every morning and evening I found myself opening and closing the curtains in the front of my house. This sort of manual repetition just won’t fly!

I automated the curtains with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a couple of stepper motors, and some timing belt. I setup Home Assistant to publish commands over MQTT and persist the curtains’ state.

I wanted to begin my laser cutting journey by making a copy of this classic board game.

The design is pieced together from a version Glowforge released and a few other derivatives on Thingiverse. So far I’ve made wheat (birch), brick (cherry), ore (walnut), wood (oak), and sheep (birch) hexes!

I replaced all of the remotes in my house with a microcontroller and an infrared LED.

Controlling it through Google Home is helpful when you can’t find the standard remote or it’s too far away!

A few years ago my grandpa showed me a book that he had handwritten called How to Bottle It. In the book he describes the process of making a ship in a bottle.

I followed his instructions and added a technological twist of my own by augmenting it with IoT connectivity!

After getting a QNAP NAS, I installed a network monitor agent just to give it a try. But after my trial expired I wasn’t ready to pay for it. Domotz is a cool product but I knew I could write something that accomplished the same goal.

My Python script scans for hosts periodically using Nmap, notifies me when a new device has connected, and saves MAC address, vendor, IP address, and connection timestamps to a database on my NAS.

Camel Up is a board game that boils down to pure probability but at the beginning of each leg of the race there are 29,160 possible outcomes!

Let’s ruin the fun and solve it by brute forcing the permutations.

I really like jokes. In an effort to spur creativity, I tweeted a joke every day for a few months!

Most of them were not great but there were a few that I’m proud of.

This was one of the first large woodworking projects I did and I really love how it turned out!

I made this table with my dad when I was in college. The process took a long time since we could usually only find one Saturday per month to work on it together.

Waking up is difficult; coffee makes it easier.

I automated this part of my morning routine using a Wi-Fi connected microcontroller.

Smart phones are ubiquitous today but not so long ago a connection to the internet was beyond the average phone’s capabilities. This translation application works over one of the most primitive cell phone features: SMS messaging.

I built it using Twilio and Google App Engine.