I work on spacecraft guidance and control for a living. On nights and weekends I build robots that have to stay upright, and write down how it is going — what worked, what did not, and the parts I got wrong.
Projects
A single arm on a bench that swings itself up and balances. A brushless motor, an encoder, and a Rust control loop on a Raspberry Pi at 200 Hz. It first balanced on 1 September 2026. It now runs five swing-ups a run under a hardware-in-the-loop regression gate, and the posts are about the places where the simulator and the bench disagreed.
A self-balancing one-wheel board. The same problem as the pendulum, except the pendulum is me. Sim-first again, and this time the failure modes matter rather more. Nothing written yet.
A two-wheeled balancing robot built so students and hobbyists could play with feedback control on something real. Open source, with a Gazebo simulation and a real-time controller on a Pi. The clip is the sim above and the robot below, driving the same square — which is where the sim-first habit came from.
A quadcopter built from scratch, plus a flight simulator written in Unity because none of the good open-source ones existed yet.
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