The Schmidt Within

THE BENCH

Everything that has crossed the workbench: robot eyes, LED clocks, sensor nodes, a drawing robot, an AI box, and the software that keeps the house running. 29 projects, each with its code, its video, and its photos where they exist.

Live

The Schmidt Within

The site you are reading, and the tool that publishes it

The family's front door on the web, served from a Synology NAS in the basement. A starfield, a few cards (the photo server, the family history archive, the projects) and nothing else. The real work here is the publisher: one Python script that copies a project folder to the NAS over ssh, swaps it into place so nobody ever sees a half-copied site, then reads the live page back and refuses to call it published until the checksums match. Every site on here, this one included, ships by double-clicking a two-line batch file. Also in this folder: the plan for the private, house-only tier and the running record of what has actually been verified.

Synology NAS
Python
Website

Live

Last activity 2026-09-04

Live

Looking East

What you are looking at when you look east from Farmington

The mountain behind Farmington and Kaysville, explained. The lake that stood 900 feet over the street, the canyons that have come down on the towns, and what was built to catch them. Almost nothing on the page is drawn by hand. The horizon is computed one ray at a time from USGS elevation data with the curve of the Earth taken out, the canyon mouths were measured off the terrain, and the lake slider floods the real contours. Every claim carries a marker saying what it rests on, and the unflattering markers get used more than the flattering ones on purpose. Built to be served from the basement with no internet dependency at all.

Static site
Python
Geology

Live

Last activity 2026-09-04

Live

Inklings

My reading log drawn as a map of who influenced whom

Every author I've read is a lit amber node, sized by how many of their books I've logged. The authors who influenced them, the ones I haven't read yet, sit around the edge as dim dashed nodes: a frontier that grows as I read. Import a Goodreads export or a Kindle library, let Wikidata fill in the documented influence links, and let a local model suggest the rest for me to confirm or reject. Three views: the map, a timeline by publication year, and a lineage finder that walks the shortest chain between two authors. One SQLite file in a container on the NAS. What you see here is a read-only copy of it: the NAS writes the map out as plain files every fifteen minutes, and the buttons that change anything exist only inside the house.

Docker on the NAS
React + Node + SQLite
Reading

Live anyone

Last activity 2026-09-04

Burg Hochosterwitz, Carinthia, in an 1890s photochrom: where the story starts

A logging crew in Oconto County, Wisconsin, 1880s to 1900

Live

The Schmidt Family Constellation

Five hundred years of one family in one file: map, timeline, tree, every claim sourced

Five hundred years of my family, pulled out of one Ancestry tree and a box of scanned papers, and turned into a single web page you move through by map, by time and by text. 635 people, 196 places in ten countries, 13 ocean crossings drawn as arcs, and every sentence tagged with what it rests on. The whole thing is one file that works with no internet at all, built by a chain of Python scripts that won't publish anything their own checks haven't blessed. It lives at theschmidtwithin.com/family/ behind a passphrase, because the family copy carries real names.

What it is

The page is called The Schmidt Family Constellation. Open it and you get a tree you can drag and zoom, drawn the way Ancestry draws one, plus Stories, Places, Everyone, and an Everything else drawer with eighteen more views: how two people connect, stand in a year, a timeline, what the dates say, what the names mean, open questions. The Places view is a map with every place the record ties somebody to, and the ocean crossings drawn as arcs, 1839 to 1924, twelve of them from the old country to the new and one visit back. A second page, From Schleben to Alaska, tells the story in prose with period photographs. Each page is one HTML file with the pictures and fonts baked in, and it never reaches out to the internet, so a copy on a USB stick works forever.

Why it's built this way

I edit the tree in exactly one place, Ancestry. RootsMagic, a family tree program on my PC, pulls it down, and my scripts read that one database and nothing else. Records travel one way, down. What the archive shows, which picture is the portrait, who stays out of the way on a crowded page, lives in files here, so I never touch Ancestry to change how a page looks. Where two papers disagree, both values stay on the page with their sources, and nothing gets averaged or dropped. When the archive works something out from the dates, it says so and shows the dates it read. The calls about what's true stay mine; the code only decides how to draw it.

What's inside

Everything runs by double-clicking a batch file. update-from-rootsmagic.bat is the one road for a pull (a fresh copy of the tree brought down from Ancestry): it proves the pull came back whole against the last one I kept, rebuilds three editions, shows me what moved, runs the check battery (the tests that re-check every promise the page makes), and asks one question, keep and publish. publish-to-nas.bat won't put up a byte the battery hasn't stamped. save-design.bat carries a color change from the page to the live site in about a minute. Since September 3 I've been able to fix a sentence of family memory on the website itself, from my phone, and pull-live-edits.bat brings those words back into the repo, the project's folder on my PC. 156 transcripts of scanned papers sit in the repo, and the facts pulled out of 81 of them land back on the right people, by name, on every pull.

The numbers

635 people, 583 of them gone and 52 living. 186 couples. 1,888 facts pulled out of the transcribed papers, 2,018 events and 2,552 citations out of the database, 158 pictures and documents attached. Birth years start in 1523. 196 places with coordinates across ten countries, 140 of them in the United States, 23 in Germany, 8 in Austria, and 13 ocean crossings drawn as arcs. 11 chapters told entirely in evidence, 80 surnames explained, 63 papers cited on people's pages. The archive works out 91 people who crossed an ocean, 24 who died young and 112 who outlived a husband or wife, three of them twice, and marks each one as worked out rather than recorded. 562 commits (saved changes to the code) in a month, 13 pulls kept, 39 publishes.

Where it stands

Live at theschmidtwithin.com/family/, which answers with a passphrase box. Because the website is locked, it carries the family edition minus a short withheld list; the page is scrambled on my PC before it leaves, and the NAS in the basement never holds anything readable. A share edition with living people stripped out of the data itself is the only copy that goes anywhere unlocked. Relatives get a texted link that skips the passphrase and asks for their name instead. The tree still grows: a pull kept on September 3 brought 37 more people and put a dot on Liverpool. Nothing about anyone living leaves the family.

Synology NAS
Python
Family archive

Led to the publisher this site uses Runs on The Schmidt Within

Live

Last activity 2026-09-04

Eyes and head following a face, 58 seconds, phone footage from 2026-07-22

Control panel teaser, 54 seconds, narrated by IRIS herself

How it is built, 45 seconds

October 2025: the first eye, on a strap, before there was a face

April 2026: eyes on the blue box, and a red dot-matrix mouth before the screen

May 2026: the face as it is now, mouth on a screen, on the workbench

Asleep: the eyes become a starfield and the mouth snores

Four boxes, one pipeline: the Pi, GandalfAI, and two Teensys

The Face tab of the control panel: eye styles and emotions

Working

IRIS

A robot face that follows you, talks back, remembers the house, and puts the music on

Most home assistants are a microphone with a personality bolted on. IRIS is the other way around. She's a face first: two round displays with eyes that find yours and follow you across the room, a mouth that moves with the words, three lights that shift with her mood, and a voice that trades quips with adults and plays I Spy with my kids. Ask her something and she starts answering in about a second and a half instead of waiting on the whole reply. Say stop and she stops. This summer she learned two more things. She remembers what the house tells her, and she'll put on a song from my own music library when you ask for it by name. None of it touches the cloud.

Why she exists

I built voice assistants before this one. They worked. Nobody wanted to talk to them. A voice answering questions from a speaker is a tool; nothing about it feels like anyone is home. Then I put a pair of animated eyes on the desk and gave them a little sensor that finds faces. Eyes that animate are interesting. Eyes that find you and follow you across a room are something else. That was the moment. IRIS grew from the eyes outward: a face, then a voice, then a personality. My day job is mental health, and IRIS borrows from how people actually attune to each other (timing, tone, a face that matches the words) and treats that as the design spec, not a metaphor.

What's inside

A Raspberry Pi 4 runs the show: the Hey IRIS wake word (the phrase that gets her attention, and I trained that model myself), the microphones, the camera, the lights, and a web control panel that has grown to seventeen tabs. A Teensy 4.1, a small microcontroller board, draws the eyes and the mouth, with 25 eye styles to pick from. A second Teensy pans the head. The heavy thinking (turning speech into text, the language model that decides what she says, and the voice) runs on GandalfAI, the workstation on the home network. No cloud, no subscription. Every reply starts with one of eleven emotion labels, and that label fires the eyes, the mouth, and the lights at the same instant, so the face means what the voice says. There are two of her, a sharp one for adults and a warm one for kids. The kids' one plays I Spy and Guess My Drawing with the camera, and Rock Paper Scissors by reading your hand with the same sensor that tracks your face.

She remembers now

Since late July she keeps a memory of what the house tells her. Ask what we talked about last weekend and she answers from the real record. The first time it worked in the room, on July 30, she named a family wedding we'd been to and the two buttons somebody found on the floor, then stopped. When her record comes up empty she says so instead of making something up. Things you tell her on purpose, a remember that said to her face, get quoted back word for word. Things she merely overheard only color her reply. Say forget that and she takes a fact back. She understands three days ago and the other day. Also, the control panel has a Memory tab where I can read what she holds, forget any of it, or promote it, which means treat something she overheard as if I'd told her on purpose.

Play Free Fallin by Tom Petty

Ask her to play a song, an album or an artist and it comes out of a separate speaker, pulled from my own music library on Plex (the app that serves my music at home), about 21,000 tracks. The first build, in August, pushed music to a Bluetooth speaker. A day later I moved it onto a small network speaker board (an ESP32) through Music Assistant, an add-on for the Home Assistant home automation app, and Bluetooth came out of the path. She looks the request up in the library, checks the artist, and only says Playing X after the player reports the stream is actually rolling. If the library doesn't have it she says so rather than playing something close. Play X radio queues up similar tracks. Pause, next, stop and volume work by voice, a plain stop on its own silences everything, and if nobody has touched it for three hours she turns it off herself.

Where it stands

The session counter just passed 300, and the changelog carries 241 of those numbers under their own headings. The code on GitHub is the real running source, not a demo. Her personality gets tested too: a small test kit sends a fixed set of prompts to the language model and marks every answer that drops the emotion tag, says as an AI, runs past 80 words, slips into therapist language, or swears. The recent work has been the unglamorous kind: a USB fault took her face offline for most of a day at the end of August and nothing noticed, so there is now a watchdog (a small program that checks she's still there and resets the USB connection when she isn't) and a full copy of her memory card on a monthly schedule, first automatic run due in October. The demo video is still owed. A few music checks still need my ears. The eye tracking sensor she started with was discontinued, so its replacement was built and proven in its own small project, CyclopsGaze, and then swapped in.

Raspberry Pi 4 + Teensy 4.1
Python + C++
Robot

Grew from TeensyEyes, MusicIP, whose matcher code the music feature borrows Led to CyclopsGaze Runs on GandalfAI

Last activity 2026-09-03

Working

MMM-Inversion

A MagicMirror module that calls the inversion before the air turns

I live on the Wasatch Front, and five or six times a winter a lid of warm air sits down on the valley and traps everything we breathe under it. The air-quality apps report the pollution once it has built up. Nothing reports the lid. This module does. It compares the weather station on my roof against a snow-survey thermometer 3,600 feet up Farmington Canyon. When the mountain gets warmer than my yard, that's the lid going on, and the panel says INVERSION, usually a day before the air-quality number catches up. It holds the top-left corner of the mirror in the photo: a two-way mirror over a monitor, in a wood frame, with a red glow behind it. Works in any valley with a rim of mountains.

Clock, weather, and the day's line, over the reflection

MagicMirror
JavaScript
Weather

Code

Last activity 2026-09-02

Working

Attune

MusicIP Mixer rebuilt: mixes by sound, then hands the result to Plex or a USB stick

MusicIP Mixer was the best playlist tool ever made. You handed it one song and it built a mix of tracks that sounded like it, from the audio, not the tags. The company folded around 2010 and I kept it alive for fifteen years anyway. Attune is my replacement. It's a Windows app that reads my library of about 21,000 analyzed tracks and builds a mix the way MusicIP did, with a built-in engine that matched or beat the original in a blind listening test. Then it does what MusicIP never could: one button copies the mix to a USB stick for the car or the kids' players, and another keeps a folder of mp3s mirrored as a playlist on Plex, my media server. No cloud, no account, one exe in one folder.

What it is

Attune is a desktop music app for Windows that runs from one exe in one folder and never phones home. It started out laid out like MusicIP Mixer and now borrows MusicBee's shape: a navigator tree on the left, genre, artist and album panes, a track table, a right rail with album art and what's up next, and a player bar along the bottom. The point isn't the player, though. The point is the mix. Pick a seed song, the one the mix grows from, and it ranks every track in the library by how close it sounds, using a neural audio embedding (a fingerprint of how the track sounds, not what it's tagged), a timbre fingerprint (the texture of the sound), and a few light rules about tempo, era and genre. Style, variety and artist spacing are the same knobs MusicIP had. On top of that it has a radio mode, saved recipes, a Genius button that picks the seed for you, and mixes that blend two or more seeds.

Why I built it

My car plays mp3s straight off a USB stick, by file and folder. So do my kids' players and the boombox. It's the most dependable music setup I've ever owned, and the missing piece was always the playlist brain. MusicIP was that brain, but getting one mix onto a stick was a chain: export from MusicIP, save the playlist file, import it into MusicBee (another music player), rebuild the playlist there, export the files, copy them over. For every mix, for fifteen years. Attune grew out of the folder where I was trying to get playlists out of MusicIP, became a from-scratch rebuild of that brain checked against my real MusicIP library, and turned into the thing that replaces it. And when the old engine finally won't run anywhere, the built-in one is mine, under an MIT license (free to use and change), and outlives it.

Two engines, and the one that won

Attune ships with two engines and a third you can switch on. If a real MusicIP Mixer is running on the machine, Attune finds it and borrows its engine. If not, it falls back to its own, called V2: a neural network trained on music (CLAP) as the ears, a timbre fingerprint alongside it, and light rules for tempo, era and genre. I captured real MusicIP mixes for five seeds and ran a blind listening test across five engines, MusicIP included. V2 matched or beat the original by ear; raw CLAP alone came in weakest because it wanders across tempo and decade. One rule came out of that: taste is judged by ear, never by a score. The third engine was trained to copy MusicIP's own rankings. You can pick it, but it doesn't become the default until it passes the same test.

Plex and the USB stick

Two exports get the mix out of the app. Take It With You copies a mix's actual audio files to a folder or a USB stick, numbered in mix order with names a car stereo can read, plus a playlist file. The Plex side does more. A mix can be pushed to Plex as a playlist, and the folder I keep for the car, 130 loose mp3s, is mirrored as a Plex playlist: Attune matches each file to the Plex library by file name, then by tags, with the track length as the referee and never a guess at a name, shows what matched and what didn't, and writes only after I've checked the list. Playlist names can carry the date, so DrivingTunesUSB ({date}) makes a new dated playlist each day I run it and leaves the old ones standing. See it in Plex opens the real playlist so I can confirm with my own eyes.

Where it stands

The exe is the product. Attune.exe was last rebuilt on September 1, 2026, and runs from frozen code with no Python install behind it. Its mix pool was last counted from the running exe on August 7: 21,215 tracks. The Plex mirror was checked from the September 1 build the same day, including the button that opens Plex in a browser. The product repo has 100 commits since July 8, 2026, across 22 numbered work sessions, and it's still version 0.1.0, unreleased. The repo went public on September 4. Every change runs through a check of 16 exported playlists that must come back byte for byte identical. What's still owed is a listening session: the blend and adventure mixes and the learned engine have been measured but never heard, and that's the only test that counts here.

Windows
Python
Music

Grew from MusicIP Playlist Export

Code

Last activity 2026-09-01

Working

Homelab

The notes and scripts that keep the house servers alive

Not a project so much as the binder. A mini PC runs Proxmox with Plex, Immich, AdGuard, and Home Assistant on it, a Synology NAS holds everything, and a GPU workstation does the AI and sleeps when it can. This folder is the operating map for all of it: which machine does what, how to reach each one, the three-tier backup design (LAN to NAS, NAS to a USB drive, NAS to off-site), and a health check script that reports on the photo server and all three backup tiers in thirty seconds. Also the audits: 14,000 photos that never made it into the photo server, duplicates, videos worth re-encoding. Basically, everything I'd need to rebuild the house from scratch.

Two fixes worth telling

The photo server (Immich) started timing out, and the mini PC that runs the house servers showed a load of 122 on four CPU threads while doing almost nothing useful. Immich was re-encoding every phone video, eleven at a time. Dropping that to two and handing the chip's built-in graphics the job got all 389 HEVC videos (the phone's format) a copy that plays anywhere, at a peak load of 3.88. The other fix was cheaper: the box had one 16 GB memory stick and an empty slot beside it, so the answer to running out of memory was a second stick, not a new PC. It's at 31 GB now.

Proxmox + Synology
Shell + PowerShell
Infrastructure

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-08-31

Working

Keyboard Stutter Detective

A wireless keyboard that repeats letters, and a monitor that says whether it's the radio or the software

My wireless keyboard started stuttering, one letter repeating itself, mostly during video calls. Two different things cause that, with opposite fixes. Either a radio packet got lost (the keyboard shares the 2.4 GHz band with Bluetooth) and Windows never saw the key come back up, or a program that watches every keystroke stalled and dumped its backlog in a burst. So I wrote a monitor that logs only timing, never which key, and an analyzer that says hardware or software and names the fix. Numbered batch files beside it keep the USB receivers powered and switch off the Bluetooth radio, each with a preview and an undo. It ran once; the worst run it caught was one key hitting 35 times. Which way the verdict went, I never wrote down.

Windows
PowerShell
Wireless keyboard

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-08-28

Working

NAS Monitor

When the NAS drives chatter, this says what is doing it

The NAS makes a clicking noise at odd hours and its own resource monitor won't tell you why. This page does. A single shell script on the NAS reads the counters the kernel already keeps (disk operations, per-connection bytes, who dialed whom, which container owns the socket) and writes one small JSON file every five seconds. A page in the same folder graphs it live: a QUIET, TICKING, or BUSY lamp, seeks per second (the number that tracks the sound, kilobytes don't), and every machine talking to the NAS with which direction it started in. Costs the NAS under one percent of a core. No history, on purpose. Look while it's happening.

Synology DS218+
Shell + HTML
Monitoring

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-08-27

Working

Bob's Bubble Rampage

A bubble game rebuilt from scratch, with a screen-time clock that pays the kids back

It started with a 2018 bubble popper whose ad networks had all died. Instead of patching someone else's app, I rebuilt the idea from nothing: tap a bubble to grow it, big ones burst, droplets fly out and set off the neighbors. The whole game is one HTML file. It runs in a browser, wraps into a tiny Android app, and serves to the iPad over the house Wi-Fi. The part I care about is the clock. Play time runs out, a short reading or math break earns it back, and every level is checked by a solver that proves it can be beaten. Two kids, two difficulty tracks, family photos as rewards, and the photos never leave the device. My son named it, and Bob is the hero.

Android + browser
HTML + JavaScript
Kids game

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-08-26

Working

PressToRevive

One big button that wakes the TV box

Two kids, nine and six, need to turn the TV box on. The box can't be woken by any keyboard, mouse, or remote, and it's not a settings problem: the firmware only offers modern standby, and USB wake simply isn't there. What does work is Wake-on-LAN. So: an arcade button on the coffee table, wired to a NodeMCU that builds the magic packet itself and broadcasts it, with no home automation server in the middle. An RGB light breathes red when the box is off, flashes green while it wakes, and sits solid green when it's up. Built, flashed, and watched waking the actual machine. The enclosure is still to come.

How the light knows

The light also has to know whether the TV box is awake, and it can't just ping it. This machine's only sleep mode keeps the network card alive, so a sleeping PC answers pings like it's up. So instead of asking, the box announces. A tiny beacon runs on it as the logged-in user and sends a small network packet every five seconds. Sleep suspends user programs but not services, which is exactly why it isn't a service, so silence means asleep. Install is one double-click, remove is another, nothing system-wide.

ESP8266 NodeMCU
C++
Home automation

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-08-09

A focus nudge on the 8-inch clock: the bloom

The seven faces, one after another

Demo: an LED ring clock that nudges you to look up (2:24)

Web UI tour: every setting, three and a half minutes

Sunflower with the room lights up; it still reads

The 15-inch build, laser-cut acrylic face

The XIAO ESP32-C3 on a scrap of perfboard

The three rings seated in the printed reflector

Working

ChronoBloom

A three-ring LED wall clock that nudges you to look up

Three rings of LEDs, 97 pixels, stacked one inside the other behind a printed diffuser. The outer 60 carries the seconds and the minutes, the same track a real clock gives both hands. The 24 and the 12 carry the hour as one spoke, and a single pixel in the middle is the stamen. It runs on a XIAO ESP32-C3 the size of a postage stamp, sets its own time off the internet, dims itself to the room, and you run the whole thing from a web page the clock serves itself. No app, no account, no cloud. Flash it from a browser, update it from a browser.

Why I built it

I lose hours in the lair. I go down to print a coloring page, find a project that needs me, and come back up empty-handed to a six-year-old asking where her pages are. Alarms don't fix that. I swipe them away mid-thought and forget. A slow change of light at the edge of my vision does work, so I built it into the thing I already look at. Focus Reminders are gentle light animations at whatever interval you set. No sound, nothing to swipe away. An alarm demands. A nudge asks. Some days it wins, some days the hyperfocus does. The project will still be there tomorrow. My kids being this age won't.

The part I'm proudest of

The colors. Six of the seven faces are named for real flowers (Moonflower, Cherry Blossom, Ember Dahlia, Lotus Pond, Sunflower, Bird of Paradise) and built from that flower's own colors, tuned on the actual LEDs until they read right. The rings map onto a flower too: petals on the outer ring, throat on the inner, stamen at the center, so a chime or a nudge reads as the clock blooming out and settling back instead of a strip cycling colors. Keeping those colors true while the light sensor dims the clock all day took real math. Most projects just turn the strip down and watch the deep reds slide to orange. This one corrects every color once and scales the frame, so a theme still looks like itself in a dark room.

The small stuff that matters

A per-frame power budget, so a plain phone charger never browns it out. Chimes on the quarter hours. A captive portal on first boot, so no WiFi password ever lives in the code. Updates over the air, with the inner ring as the progress bar. Two buttons on the back as the fallback for the day the WiFi is down. Also, the photos don't do it justice: these are bright, narrow-band LEDs behind a diffuser, and your eye reads them in a way a camera can't.

Where it came from

Steve Manley built the original ring clock in 2015, and the printed reflector that shapes the light into pointed hands is a remix of his design. Then a decade of my own rebuilds: an Arduino Nano edition with a clock chip and two fiddly buttons, an ESP8266 port that ran on the wall for years, an 8-inch build sized until the off-the-shelf rings seat exactly, a 15-inch one scaled to match strip LEDs, and finally ChronoBloom, the ground-up rewrite with the web UI and the focus nudges. The front diffuser is mine. The credit chain is in the repo.

XIAO ESP32-C3
C++
LED clock

Grew from Steve Manley's 2015 NeoPixel ring clock

Last activity 2026-08-08

Working

CyclopsGaze

One eye on a round display that watches your face

The eyes on IRIS used a little face-detecting board called the Person Sensor to know where to look. Then it got discontinued, which is a problem for a project other people are meant to be able to build. CyclopsGaze is the testbed I built to answer one question: can DFRobot's AI camera stand in for it without the eyes losing their soul? It can. One Teensy, one 1.28-inch round display, one camera, and you get an eye that tracks a real face instead of wandering on a timer. About $47 in parts. It's also a Halloween prop waiting to happen. The driver went straight back into IRIS.

Bench demo, 38 seconds, captioned: the eye finds a face and follows it

The one that didn't work

This wasn't the first try. Before it I built OGLE, a camera board that did face detection on its own chip and sent one line of text over USB. It got built, flashed and given Wi-Fi updates, and then retired in July 2026, because at the real distance and lighting on IRIS's desk it kept reporting no face, or a face it wasn't sure about. CyclopsGaze exists because OGLE didn't work.

Teensy 4.1
C++
Animatronics

Grew from TeensyEyes Led to IRIS

Code

Last activity 2026-07-27

Working

SSH Address Book

A one-click SSH launcher for everything on the LAN

I've got a Proxmox box, a NAS, a Pi, a GPU workstation, and a handful of boards, and every one of them has a different port, user, and key. This is a small Windows app, one exe, that keeps them in a list with big Connect buttons. Click one and it opens Windows Terminal or PuTTY with the right ssh line already typed. Add, edit, test, and search from the same window. It's built for a personal desktop on a home network, so it keeps things simple in ways you wouldn't want on a shared machine. Python and Tkinter, one file of hosts beside the exe, nothing else to install.

Windows
Python + Tkinter
Utility

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-07-05

Working

LAN Before-and-After

Did the ad blocker actually change anything? Measure it.

Before AdGuard Home, an ad blocker for the whole house, went on the network I wanted a baseline, not a feeling. One batch file pings eight house machines from a fixed list, times how long twenty everyday sites take to look up, checks whether fourteen known ad and tracker domains still answer, runs a traceroute, and writes a dated report. Run it before, run it after, put them side by side. A second script sweeps the network and lists every device and what it's listening on; the one run on disk found 36 live devices and could put a name to 7 of them. Six reports over ten days. Before: 12 of the 14 ad domains answered. After: 12 of 14 blocked, and everyday lookups got no slower.

Home network
PowerShell
AdGuard Home

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-07-04

Working

Last.fm to Plex

Years of listening history, turned into Plex playlists

I've scrobbled to Last.fm for years (its word for logging every track you play), so it knows my loved tracks, my all-time top tracks, albums and artists, and what I was playing in each stretch of my life. Plex, the media server where the music actually lives, knows none of it. This is a batch-file menu with nine choices: pull each of those lists from Last.fm and match them against my Plex library into playlists, build era playlists from the year stamped on each MP3, build mood playlists from the genre tags, and export every Plex playlist as a backup. Matching is the whole job. Names never agree, so it strips the feat. and the parentheses before comparing. What it can't find goes into a text file.

Plex
Python
Music

Led to Attune, which took over the Plex side

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-06-27

Working

TeensyEyes

Chris Miller's animated eyes for Teensy, the seed that grew into IRIS

This is Chris Miller's port of Adafruit's Uncanny Eyes to the Teensy 4, and I keep it on the bench because everything with eyes in this house descends from it. It draws a whole eye in real time (sclera, iris texture, pupil, eyelids) on a 1.28-inch round display, and it does it fast enough to look alive. My first modification, back in 2023, bolted a Person Sensor onto it so a single eye on a Teensy 4.0 would look at whoever walked in. That experiment is what turned a voice assistant into IRIS. The code here is his and the credit is his. I just couldn't stop building on it.

Teensy 4.x
C++
Animatronics

Led to IRIS, CyclopsGaze

Last activity 2026-03-13

Working

SCARA Drawing Robot

A two-arm drawing robot on three hobby servos, ported to an ESP32-S3

Mateusz Juszczyk's drawing robot: two servos swing a pair of printed arms, a third lifts the pen, and a little web page served by the board itself turns your drawing into arm angles. I built mine on an ESP32-S3 Zero instead of the board he used, which meant moving the servo pins off the boot pin, a custom partition table so the web app would fit, and a fair bit of fiddling with the main loop. It got to the point where I named the workspace file GOOD, which is as much of a changelog as this one has. The printed parts are on MakerWorld and the firmware is his repo. Mine is the pin map and the partitions.

The flashing chore

Flashing the board got its own helper: a PowerShell menu that lists the COM ports (the USB serial ports), lets me pick the firmware file from a file dialog, erases the chip, reads its ID, builds the merged firmware from the PlatformIO project (the build tool), and writes it to the chip at address zero with the right size and mode.

ESP32-S3
C++ + Preact
Robot

Last activity 2026-01-05

Lit up, February 2025

Day one: the Precision opened up, Dell's shroud still in

The fan panel, from a cardboard template

The water block and the lines, March 2025

The wave light bar, from the build video

Working

GandalfAI

A Dell Precision 5820 gutted and rebuilt around a water-cooled RTX 3090

This is the machine IRIS thinks with: the speech-to-text, the language model, and the voice all run here, so the robot in the kitchen answers in about a second and a half without a word leaving the house. It also listened to 21,000 songs for Attune. I bought a used Dell Precision 5820 workstation and tore out most of what Dell put in it (the drive cages, the shroud, the stock cooling) to make room for a water-cooled RTX 3090, 64 GB of system memory, radiators, a pump and a reservoir, and lighting. Then I cut and printed the parts to hold it all together.

What went into it

The fan panel started as a cardboard template, got hole-sawed out of acrylic, and took a 360 radiator with three fans on the outside of the case. The curved shroud pieces are 3D printed. The bracket that holds the plumbing is purple acrylic. The light bar is a wave cut from clear acrylic with an LED strip glued along the bottom edge, so the whole thing glows blue in the dark. A lot of the build was just fitting, sleeving, and tubing, one evening at a time, on a towel on the floor.

Why

I wanted a box that could run a big language model, speech to text, and a real voice all at once, at home, with nothing leaving the house. A 24 GB card is the price of admission for that. I built this right before the memory market went sideways, and the whole machine came in at about half what that one card costs on its own today. It sleeps when nobody needs it and wakes on a network packet the moment IRIS hears her name.

Dell Precision 5820 + RTX 3090
Water cooling
AI workstation

Runs IRIS, Attune

No public links yet.

Last activity 2025-03-03

Working

Infinity Cube

Six mirrors, 230 LEDs, and a tunnel of light that goes on forever

An infinity cube is a box of six two-way mirrors with an LED strip along every inner edge. Look into any face and the reflections bounce between the mirrors and recede into a tunnel of light that seems to go on forever. Mine is 3D printed from an open design (the frame, a top and bottom, and a stand with a pocket for the controller), with 230 addressable LEDs run by an ESP32 on WLED, so it takes any of WLED's effects and the sound-reactive ones too. The print file, the WLED settings, and the presets are all backed up. A photo is not, which is the one thing this entry is missing.

ESP32 + WLED
3D printed + two-way mirror
Light

Last activity 2024-05-01

Working

Lowrider Bike

Built at thirteen. Twisted chrome, red velvet, whitewalls.

Before any of the code, there was this. I built it at thirteen: a lowrider on a cruiser frame, painted deep red, with twisted chrome everything. The springer fork, the sissy bar, the handlebars, the pedals, all twisted. A button-tucked red velvet seat on a spring. Fine-spoked chrome wheels on whitewalls, and chrome fenders you can see yourself in. It's still in the basement by the pool table, and it still shines. Everything else on this page came after it, and I think a lot of it came from it: the first time I took a pile of parts and a picture in my head and ended up with the thing.

The whole bike, cropped to keep my kid out of the shot

From behind: velvet seat, sissy bar, chrome fender

Steel and chrome
Hand built
Lowrider

No public links yet.

Last activity 2021-08-10

In progress

RDP Disconnect Fix

Remote Desktop kept dropping and blaming encryption. It wasn't encryption.

My laptop's Remote Desktop session to the main PC kept dying with a data encryption error. Every online guide chases that message. Dead end. Windows' own event log showed the encrypted channel was already up when the connection got torn down. What failed was the layer above it, the part that ships the picture, and Windows has no better error to print. So, two batch files: one reads the last two weeks of sessions and says why each one ended, the other applies the fixes, backs everything up and writes a revert file. The laptop side didn't cure it. What's left is a script for the main PC that turns off hardware video encoding, and I never wrote down whether it worked, so this one's still open.

Windows
PowerShell
Remote Desktop

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-07-29

In progress

VIGIL Nodes

Room sensor nodes that point a ring of light at whoever is in the room

A VIGIL node is an ESP32-S3 with two 24GHz radar sensors and a 241-LED ring. The radar tracks up to three people by bearing and distance, and the ring draws a needle that swings toward whoever is moving, brighter the closer they get. A rotary knob sets brightness and the stillness threshold. Version 3 is flashed, on the bench, and does the thing I set out to make it do: the needle points at the person. What's not built yet is the other half, the display that the nodes report to over the network. That half belongs to IRIS, so VIGIL waits on it.

The nine-ring, 241-LED board before wiring

Data lines run ring to ring under kapton

ESP32-S3 + mmWave radar
C++ + Python
Presence sensing

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-06-15

In progress

Stink Lake Sheriff

A chaos game my nine-year-old designed, built in Godot, a free game engine

This one is my son's game. A dog cop who fires lacrosse balls walks into a town square, and everything sets off a chain reaction: hit a sheep with a lacrosse ball, that sheep hits three more, the old man on the dock ends up in the lake, and a poop-emoji chaos meter climbs. His design doc lays out the whole town, its zones, its characters, and what happens when you hit each one. I picked Godot (a free game engine) because its scripts are plain enough that one day he can change a number himself and see what happens. The first chunk is built and exported as a Windows program: one square, one weapon, five sheep, a chaos meter, and a save file. The rest of his list is still his list.

Godot 4
GDScript
Kids game

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-05-09

In progress

Laminar Flow Jet

A glass rod of water, lit from inside, built from a thousand straws

A laminar jet is a stream of water so smooth it looks like a glass rod. You get it by calming the water down: it comes in rough from the pump, gets slowed through baffles and a low-pass filter that soaks up the pump's pulses, then runs through thousands of drinking straws packed in a cylinder so every thread of it moves the same direction, pools, and leaves through one sharp-edged nozzle. Light it from behind and the stream carries the light like a fiber optic, glowing all the way to where it lands. Mine is built from scratch: the stainless body, the straw pack, a one-inch solid fiber optic rod fed by a 20 W addressable LED, and the filter. The yard is trenched for it. The stone basin it lands in is next.

On the patio table for the first test, with a supervisor

The manifold: pump line in, filtered line out

Trenching the yard for the water and power run

Stainless + straws + fiber optic
Plumbing + 12 V LED
Water feature

Last activity 2026-02-23

In progress

Clockwise

Jonathas Barbosa's 64x64 matrix clock, pulled to the bench and not yet built

Clockwise is an open source wall clock on a 64x64 RGB matrix and an ESP32, with pixel-art faces (Mario, Pacman, a world map) and a browser flasher so you never touch a toolchain. I pulled it down at the end of 2025. Nothing here is mine and I haven't wired a panel to it yet. It's here because ChronoBloom's README names it as the comparison: nothing in my clock touches its pixel-art faces, and its flash-from-a-browser setup is the bar I measured ChronoBloom's own flasher against. So it sits on the bench as the next clock to build and as a reference for how a hobby firmware should welcome strangers.

ESP32 + HUB75 matrix
C++
LED clock

Code Jonathas Barbosa

Last activity 2025-12-30

Retired

MusicIP Playlist Export

The investigation that turned into Attune

MusicIP Mixer builds great playlists and then keeps the song files locked up inside itself. All I wanted was for the tracks in a mix to land in a folder I could copy to the car. This folder is the investigation: poking at its binary playlist files, AutoHotkey scripts prodding a preferences dialog that turned out not to have the field, registry spelunking, and the write-up that concluded a script would have to do the job MusicIP wouldn't. That script was the seed. The research here got split out and grew into Attune, which replaced MusicIP altogether, so this one is retired and kept for the paper trail.

Windows
PowerShell + AutoHotkey
Music

Led to Attune

No public links yet.

Last activity 2026-07-10

Retired

TV Ambilight

238 LEDs behind the TV, painting the wall with the picture

Before any of the clocks, there was a strip of addressable LEDs (each one settable to its own color) around the back of the TV, driven by Hyperion, a free program that watches the edges of the picture, so the wall behind the screen glowed with whatever color was at the edge of the frame. What's left of it on disk is the map: 238 LEDs, each one told which slice of the screen it watches, plus the strip settings, dated January 2019. There's an even older set from 2017, from the Windows tool I tried first. There's no photo of it in the folder and nothing here is newer than 2020, so it's retired until a picture turns up.

WS2812 LED strip
Hyperion
Ambilight

Led to every LED project after it

No public links yet.

Last activity 2020-10-16

How this page was checked

Built 2026-09-04 by reading each project folder on the workbench PC: its README, its docs, and its git history. A status chip comes from evidence in that folder (a commit date, a status line in the README, a build folder, a note saying it was superseded), not from memory. Every link on this page answered when it was fetched that day: repositories and sites with a plain request, videos through YouTube's own lookup so a deleted video would have shown up as missing. Repositories that are private were left without a Code link rather than linked to a page that would not open.

The photos and clips are Joe's own, pulled from the project folders and the phone. Build photos were auto-leveled and lightly sharpened, nothing more. Three of the hardware entries (TeensyEyes, the drawing robot, Clockwise) are other people's code that this bench builds on. They are labeled with the author's name on the link, and the entry says what part is mine.

This page records one moment. If a project has moved on since 2026-09-04, the project folder is right and this page is stale.