This site is a working journal and project archive for research I do mostly alone, mostly in a home workshop, mostly on problems that sit between disciplines.
The through-line, if there has to be one: making technically sophisticated capabilities accessible at scales and price points where they currently aren’t. The current instantiation is microrobotics — specifically, control of untethered effectors at the millimeter-to-centimeter scale, in the transitional-Reynolds regime where institutional research is sparse and existing control methodologies degrade poorly under limited sensing. Earlier instantiations include work on ant nesting behaviour and distributed actuation. Future instantiations will probably not be microrobotics.
I’m interested in this target because I’m in it. I can’t afford institutional-grade imaging systems or custom-fabricated actuators, so the research I do has to work on hardware I can build in a basement workshop. This constraint turns out to sharpen the technical contribution rather than weaken it, because the problems that matter for accessible-scale research are underinvested-in relative to their practical importance.
The site is organized into three zones:
- journal — dated posts, rough, what I’m working on this week or month, with whiteboard photos and mid-project notes. This is where most of the activity is.
- projects — living documents, one per major research thread. Updated as things progress. Read these to understand what each thread is about; read the journal to see it in motion.
- about (this page) — updated rarely.
Some notes on how to read this site:
- It’s a journal, not a portfolio. Some posts are finished thoughts; many are works in progress. If something looks rough, that’s usually because it is.
- Publication is deliberately ~6 months behind current work, for reasons related to not getting leapfrogged on my own research. The stuff you read here is stable enough to share.
- I publish in bursts when I have the energy, not on a regular schedule. Silence doesn’t mean abandonment.
- If anything here is useful to you — especially if you’re building something at home that a university-scale project would normally handle — I’d love to hear from you.
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