Projects

Programmatic PCB Design in KiCad

I’ve ended up doing a lot of software-generated PCB layouts in KiCad, and I’ve created some tools for those projects. These are getting little out-of-date now though – based on older KiCad versions – and are not actively maintained. So if useful, it’s probably only as a reference or starting point and will require some updates for whatever today’s KiCad version is when you read this.

This Component Layout plugin is a general tool for placing footprints from an input config file, and was used for DMF board designs and other projects
CurvyCad is a tool for laying out periodic traces along a curve, which I wrote for creating the Gauss Speedway
dmfwizard, a python tool dedicated to designing digital microfluidic device layouts

Electronics/Software Projects

Zencan is a Rust library for implementing a CANopen node, and for talking to them
The Gauss Speedway: A magnet racetrack on a PCB
An acoustic phased array for direction finding
A High Voltage Amplifier with +/- 200V output range.
I built the classic DIY toaster oven controller with an ESP32 and a React front-end…for some reason.
I built a 64-bit magnetic core memory – also for “reasons”.
I built a wireless temperature/humidity sensor with e-ink display to mount on AC outlets, and then I decided it would be better to just buy commercial sensors and collect the data with am RTL-SDR
I wrote about my effort to reverse engineer the Nikon CLS flash control system, and an analysis of D90 shutter delay
I built this Toepler Holtz Electrostatic Generator a long time ago
Here’s a simple but fun ultrasonic acoustic levitation demo

Photography

I used to be really into photography.