Although I'm mostly a software guy, I do enjoy throwing together the occasional hardware project. Both of the ones on this page started out as schoolwork, but ended being quite a bit more.

SmartOutlet

Extension cord switchable via computer (source code)

This is one of my favorite projects ever, and to this day it's in my living room controlling my lamp. I basically just threw an opto-isolator and TRIAC in the middle of the extension cord, so I can turn anything connected to it on and off with a GPIO signal. It's currently connected to an RPi, and controllable via a Staples Easy button I cannablized and nailed to the wall, my chatbot Sibyl, or an app on my Pebble.

Audio Amplifier

BJT audio amplifier

This was my first big electronics project, and the only one that needed a significant amount of design and troubleshooting. It was incredibly cool to plug in my MP3 player to one end, a speaker to the other end, and hear undistorted music come out. Took so much work, and died forever after we tried to add a potentiometer for controlling volume, but still learned so much doing it and trying to fix it. I'm also proud because my group was the only one in the class that tried to design it using guidance from the textbook rather than googling a schematic.