Active
3D Printing Adventures
Diving headfirst into 3D printing as a complete newbie. Currently battling with Blender to make simple shapes that actually look like what I intended. Using a BambuLab A1, so at least bed leveling is automatic—one less thing to worry about!
Current Challenges:
- Why doesn't my cube look like a cube in Blender?
- Supports are still my nemesis
- Getting smooth textures on intricate prints is a pain
- PLA vs PETG vs ABS... so many choices!
Custom Water-Cooled PC Build
Because air cooling is too simple, right? Built a custom water loop for my beast of a PC. Went with soft tubing for maintainability (smart choice!) and running 3x 360mm radiators to keep my CPU and dual RTX 3090s nice and cool. The loop is built, but the journey continues...
Current Battles:
- RGB sync is being an absolute nightmare
- Finding optimal airflow for 3 radiators is tricky
- Push, pull, or push-pull config? Still experimenting
- Cable management with all these RGB headers... help
Smart Home Automation
Making my home smarter one device at a time. Running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and slowly connecting everything. The goal? Never having to flip a switch manually again. The reality? Debugging why the lights turned on at 3 AM.
Recent Wins:
- Motion-activated lights that actually work
- Temperature-based AC control
- Automated plant watering (plants are still alive!)
- Voice control that understands me 60% of the time
Completed
DIY NAS Build
Built my own NAS because cloud storage is too mainstream (and expensive). Running TrueNAS with 4x8TB drives in RAID-Z2. It's been rock solid and hosts everything from family photos to my Plex library.
What I learned:
- ZFS is amazing but has a learning curve
- ECC RAM is worth it for data integrity
- Proper backups are still important (3-2-1 rule)
- Power consumption adds up over time
Beat Saber Modding Setup
Successfully modded Beat Saber on my Quest 2 to add custom songs. Now I can pretend I'm exercising while slashing blocks to my favorite music. The setup process was... an adventure, but totally worth it.
Key achievements:
- Custom songs library with 200+ tracks
- Scoresaber integration for competitive play
- Custom sabers that look awesome
- Wireless PCVR streaming working smoothly
Failed
The Impossible Phone Stand
Tried to design a "simple" adjustable phone stand in Blender. What could go wrong? Everything, apparently. The design looked great on screen but physics had other plans. Three iterations later, I have a collection of plastic pieces that excel at not holding phones.
Lessons learned:
- Tolerances matter more than I thought
- PLA is not great for spring mechanisms
- Test with cardboard prototypes first
- Simple != Easy
Archived
Hand of ROS
Remember those claw machines at arcades? I basically built one that drives itself around. It's a robotic arm on a Roomba that competes with other bots to grab prizes. Used fancy tech like SLAM and stereo vision, but honestly, watching it navigate is like watching a very determined robot vacuum with ambitions.
PyROS - The Firefighting Bot
Built an autonomous firefighting robot because, well, robots putting out fires is just cool. It uses cameras and sensors to find and extinguish flames. No actual fires were harmed in the making of this project (we used candles).
xDCTCP - Making Data Centers Faster
Created a congestion control protocol that's like a traffic controller for data centers. It figures out which data packets are in a hurry (short flows) and which ones can wait (long flows). Think of it as an express lane for your important emails while your Netflix download takes the scenic route.