Portfolio

Professional Work

Computational modeling of solar concentrators - Toor Lab (2023)

I interned at a solar lab in Iowa for the summer after my sophomore year of HS, where I worked on a team of students researching 3D-printed concentrators for CPV systems.
The images in the graph above were generated by Radiance, a command-line Unix-style raytracing tool, which was actually quite fun to work with! I wrote the code described in the blue and red sections of this flowchart, plus <datavis/montage.fish>. One of my other contributions was implementing the team’s concentrator design in OpenSCAD, and iterating on it with feedback.

General hardware+infra intern - Pantograph PBC (2025)

This was an early-stage robotics startup I worked for a bit after graduating high school. I’m under NDA, but, at a high level, here are some things I worked on:

• Python backend for handling camera footage
• Creating and deploying Ansible playbooks (both cloud and on-prem)
• Software framework for testing hardware components
• Writing specs for cables and fasteners, sourcing materials and compute hardware
• Debugging CANbus signalling issues
• Assembling robots
• Parcel delivery (lol)

Programming

I run Linux on almost every device I own, and am pretty familiar with sysadmin work - my usual stack is (Alpine or Fedora) + Docker Compose. I also have some experience with NixOS and with Debian and Arch-based distros.

For embedded, I usually use PlatformIO or ESP-IDF - here’s two respective examples:

• https://github.com/redcathode/led-wall/blob/main/src/main.cpp
• https://github.com/redcathode/blights_esp32_server/blob/main/main/esp_rest_main.c

Pictured above is a desktop productivity app I made; it works on Windows and Linux (only X11/Xwayland) using FLTK and platform-specific Xlib (C) and Win32 (C++) code.

This website was built with Astro, which, among other things, lets me have Markdown, JSX, and an RSS feed, while still serving my website as static files - pretty neat!

Electronics

I generally don’t design PCBs for one-off projects, but I sometimes need to fit parts into a very small form factor or break out an SMD-only part. Here’s one such example of both, a small ATtiny1614 board I designed in KiCad for a handheld epaper watch in 2022:

Also from 2022: this funky-looking 200wh (!) USB-C power bank, consisting of a custom-made enclosure housing a stack of 16 EVE 33Vs. I also ended up cobbling together a spot welder from some supercapacitors and MOSFETs I had lying around, but that has unfortunately since been repurposed into other projects.

A 900-watt water-cooled LED array (successor to this 100w one), mounted onto a bamboo scaffold. This was something of a rush job - for lack of an inexpensive solution that met my absurd power requirements, I made a bespoke PSU by strapping a stepper motor to a variac and then running it through a bridge rectifier.

I have since recognized that this was a bit of a fire hazard; were I to do it again, I’d use an SMPS from the get-go, machine all-metal water cooling mounts, and, most importantly, build a proper metal enclosure rather than using bamboo I harvested from our neighbor’s backyard.

I helped set up, manage, and maintain my school’s 3D printing lab (around 8 Ender 3s) - speaking of which, here’s a modified first-gen Ender 3 running at ~5x stock speed:

Misc

Winch Robot

In 2022 I thought up a design for a robot that manipulated itself on a 2D surface using 2 winches, and decided to try building one using what I had on me at the time. Here it is in operation:

Kalshi

I got interested in forecasting a bit before I finished high school. I made a Kalshi account, and did a ~16x over the course of a few months.