Logs
Notes on building, the hard parts.
Technical deep-dives, hardware post-mortems, and system write-ups I wrote so the next person — usually me — doesn’t make the same mistakes.
- Robotics / Autonomy
Shadow Stalker: Finding a Boat in the Arctic With a Drone Fleet
How we reverse-engineered a live Gazebo + ArduPilot Arctic simulation and built a fleet-wide search system — a three-stage vision engine, pixel-to-GPS trigonometry, a pan/tilt tower watch, and a fixed-wing-to-quad handoff — to find a moving vessel without ever touching the simulator's ground truth.
17 min read · Read write-up →
- Local AI / Systems
Running Open-Weight LLMs on a Mac Mini — What Actually Mattered
Why I moved my models onto a desk, why memory bandwidth decides everything, and the unglamorous work — context caps, launchd supervision, single-resident weights — that keeps a local model server alive.
4 min read · Read write-up →
- Systems / OS
Flow Arch — Engineering a Productivity-First Operating System
The real mechanics behind Flow Arch: a Hyprland session manager that blocks distracting windows by title, an HSV screen-scrape "visual guard", hyprlock Pomodoro lockouts, per-goal hosts blocklists, and optional shutdown on deadline. 700+ downloads and a SourceForge Rising Star Award.
7 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / Robotics
The Anatomy of a Drone: Understanding the Key Components
An engineering breakdown of the subsystems that make an autonomous multirotor work — and the key architectural split between a flight controller and a companion computer, with real numbers from a litter-mapping build.
6 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / AI
Basil Home AI — Building an Embedded Smart Fridge Engine on QNX RTOS
How our four-person team turned QNX RTOS, a Raspberry Pi camera, a custom YOLOv5 model, a FastAPI inventory backend, and Gemini into a working smart fridge at Hack the 6ix — and won Deloitte's Best Use of AI for Green.
6 min read · Read write-up →
- Games / Physics
Engineering a Flight Physics Engine Inside Minecraft
Real flight physics as a Fabric mod: a server-side PlaneEntity whose throttle, drag, lift, and stall model runs inside Minecraft's fixed 20-tick simulation — with per-tick pedal speed, graded landings, and NBT-persisted speed. 1,200+ downloads.
6 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / Robotics
Developing a ROS2 Quadruped — Guis, Gaits, and Forward Kinematics
Building a four-legged walker with ROS2: steppers + 8 servos on a Raspberry Pi, a Tkinter GUI that renders the robot from real forward kinematics, and a record/playback loop that turns gaits into data instead of code.
6 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / Robotics
All About the Field of Robotics: Ethics, Impacts, and Careers
The societal, economic, and ethical dimensions of autonomous robotics, the careers behind them, and what building my own drone + walking-gripper research system actually taught me.
6 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / Robotics
Building an Autonomous Drone with Raspberry Pi & Pixhawk
Bridging companion-computer autonomy with Pixhawk flight control over a hardware UART using DroneKit Python, and what the load and GPS tests actually measured.
5 min read · Read write-up →
- Hardware / Robotics
GreenGuardian: Vision-on-the-Move Weed Spot Spraying
How a Raspberry Pi 4, a TensorFlow Lite weed classifier, and an HSV yellow-bloom stage became a rover that spot-sprays weeds — 90% less herbicide, 94% precision, Bronze at CWSF 2024.
6 min read · Read write-up →