bay41 is a maker workshop, part workbench, part lab notebook.
I took apart my first thing when I was about four. It was a yellow Walkman. I couldn’t put it back together. Thirty-something years later, I usually can.
I’ve been coding for 30+ years and engineering professionally for 20+ of that, currently based in Northern California. I taught myself BASIC at seven on a toy computer with no storage. I’d write programs on paper and retype them every time. By ten I was building PCs from parts I pulled out of the trash. By seventeen I was etching my own PCBs with transparent film, sunlight, photoreactive boards, and acid baths. That energy never really stopped.
Since then I’ve touched a bit of everything: robots with ROS, custom PCBs with SMD reflow, firmware in assembler and C, laser cutting, laser engraving, 3D printing, resin casting, woodwork, 3D modeling for print, and every sensor I could get my hands on: ultrasound, LiDAR, IR, ToF, IMUs, reed switches, hall effect, capacitive touch, load cells, temperature, humidity, pressure. I’ve got a maxed-out server rack in the garage, a sourdough starter in the kitchen, and a home automation system complex enough to have its own name.
On the software side, I’ve lost count entirely. A bug-riddled Monopoly clone in Visual Basic at sixteen. A DVD collection database. A LAN-only chat system. A mouse clicker speed challenge with anti-cheating detection. Those were the early ones, the kind of projects where you learn by building something that barely works and then figuring out why. Professionally it turned into two decades of building systems at every scale, from barely-funded two-person startups to the biggest companies in the world with billions of users, and everything in between. These days I’m deep in AI: local inference, model evaluation, custom pipelines, and the kind of tooling that sits between “I have a model” and “I have a product.”
The project list on the hardware side is just as long. An 8,000-pixel synchronized Christmas light show choreographed to music. A 15-foot outdoor LED screen. An interactive mirror built with a two-way mirror and a hidden display. A flying helium-inflated autonomous shark named Bruce. Geocache puzzles. An interactive spin-the-wheel for prizes. Arcade machines like Hoop-a-Palooza (a Pop-A-Shot conversion with custom electronics), Arm-a-Geddon (inspired by Down the Clown). A levitating Harry Potter replica wand. A robot ramp for the vacuum robot. Two-story custom furniture to house cat litter robots. An xLights-controlled gender reveal game, a 5x5 grid of balloons where each pop lit up blue or pink, split 50/50 with no color on the last square, followed by a full choreographed light show and music for the reveal. Ikea furniture is like Lego to me.
Halloween gets its own paragraph. ESP32-controlled smoke machine cauldrons, battery powered, RGB LEDs, web interface for configuration. A pirate scene with a moving skeleton that sits in a chair and looks around. A self-swirling potion. A treasure chest filled with 3D-printed skulls that have OLED screens for eyes. A replica of the talking skull from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.
This site is partly so I stop forgetting what I’ve built.
What you’ll find here:
Hardware teardowns and reverse engineering. Maker builds in various states of completion, some polished, some held together with hot glue and optimism. Home automation deep dives. AI and local inference experiments. Honest product reviews where “honest” means “I did the math.” The occasional rant about misleading marketing in the tech industry. Custom PCB designs. Firmware adventures. Light show engineering. Halloween prop builds. And whatever else I’m obsessed with that week.
No schedule, no SEO, no newsletter pop-ups. I write here when I have something worth writing about.
The name:
“Bay” as in a workshop bay, a station where things get built and fixed. 41 is an Easter egg.
Contact:
If you want to reach me, you’ll figure it out.