technology

Take control BAK! Smart devices need to be simple and work seamlessly with our physical environment. BAK is a modern high quality knob and button interface which lets you control almost anything wirelessly. Think of it more as a stationary physical control surface that you don’t have to pull out of your pocket, unlock, then find the app to turn a light on with. 

At it’s core is a rotary encoder with a heavy solid aluminum knob providing assignable actions to clockwise, counter-clockwise and various depress actions as well as providing visual feedback with an addressable RGB light ring. Assignable elements can also be ‘Alexa’ enabled allowing you to say “Alexa, turn on the light” (though this functionality does not work when on battery power). 

Leveraging an ESP8266 and built on NodeMCU, there are a ton of additional capabilities which could be enabled or added. A LiPo battery cell provides decent operating time assuming the RGB lighting is exercised minimally. I have also been testing the ESP32 to better understand the difference in regards to power consumption as it could be a viable candidate moving forward. Setup and configuration of action assignment is via a Web App running on the device. The enclosure is repurposed Ipe wood scrap.

This was an IoT project combining two 6-Axis IMU’s with an ESP32 SOC to accurately track an objects motion in 3D space.

The SOC has a web server running locally to both host the visualization of the data (leveraging Chart.js) and provide a WebSocket interface to stream the measurements at very low latency to any host application or web client over Wifi.

Media Express CD / DVD Vending Kiosks.  I worked directly with our fabricator to build these prototypes to spec, integrating various other custom components built by myself - including the machine - computer interface.

These pictures were taken at EMF's (the same fabricator who made the original Coinstar machines) manufacturing facility in Redmond, WA. Photos from 09-02-1998.

This was a Microchip PIC 16F84A based controller board with integrated RS-485 networking I designed to perform three different functions depending on how the PCB was populated.  Being my first PCB production run and trying to be as cost conscious as possible, it was only a two layer PCB.

The 1st function was a stepper motor driver with positional feedback.  The second was a hopper motor controller with count tracking.  The third was a bill acceptor controller providing bill validation detail.

Designed the modular core element of the DVD and CD kiosks - the media hopper.  These were designed to be robust but cost effective and simple to produce at scale as each machine had 30 of these.  All were networked via RS-485 and controlled with my universal controller boards.

First 8-bit and 16-bit ISA Bus PC Cards and External Parallel Interface Versions.  These also include controlling coin hoppers and keypad input integrations.