Electronics & Workbench Projects

Microcontrollers, reverse-engineering, radio scraping, retro hardware, and board repairs.

Workbench Philosophy

I treat electronics, soldering, and microcontrollers as practical tools to solve real problems around the home, shop, and field. Whether writing custom ESP32 firmware, sniffing Bluetooth notifications, intercepting radio packets off the roof, or fixing vintage silicon, I prefer local-first, low-power solutions that don't depend on cloud services.

Vehicle projects live on the Volkswagen Taos page — custom ESP32 Bluetooth OBD-II engine telemetry, cabin and audio mods, and a MeshCore 915 MHz antenna mount.

BLE Reverse-Engineering: EGO Mower Telemetry

Wanted to keep tabs on power draw and battery pack health on my electric mower without relying on official mobile apps. I sniffed and decoded the raw Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) notification packets coming off the battery management system, then wrote custom ESP32 firmware to parse the broadcast. It dumps real-time state of charge, voltage, and discharge rates straight to Home Assistant over MQTT.

Radio Scraping & Telemetry (SDR & OpenDTU)

WeatherB Station (RTL-SDR): Uses an RTL-SDR dongle running rtl_433 to intercept sub-1GHz radio chatter from 433 MHz outdoor weather sensors around the property, parsing the signals to drive the local WeatherB dashboard.
OpenDTU Solar Interception: An ESP32 with a sub-1GHz radio module sits in the shop listening to raw telemetry broadcast by the Hoymiles microinverters on the roof, feeding individual panel stats directly into Home Assistant.
MeshCore Repeaters: Building and tuning 915 MHz LoRa nodes and solar repeaters to keep localized, off-grid text and telemetry messaging alive across town.

Retro Consoles, PCs & General Board Repair

I spend a lot of workbench time repairing, recapping, and modifying vintage computers and gaming hardware. Projects include building custom RS-232 Wi-Fi modems so Commodore 8-bit PCs can hit Telnet BBSs, setting up dial-up server bridges for retro consoles like the Sega Dreamcast, optical drive emulators (GDEMU), flash cart setups, and general component-level troubleshooting.

3D Printing & Smart Home Integration

FDM and resin 3D printers serve as physical tooling for the workbench—printing custom enclosures for microcontrollers, outdoor radio node housings, sensor brackets, and replacement parts. Everything ties back into a local Home Assistant instance running on Proxmox to keep climate, energy monitoring, and custom sensor nodes working without outside intervention.