Derek’s Projects and Hobbies

Wii portable

This is a device that is made by physically cutting up a Wii motherboard and rewiring it to be usable in a handheld form factor. The designs and boards used are community-made.

Finished system
Close up on circuitry
Internals
Closer up on circuitry

Artificial skylight

Recreating artificial skylights on a budget. The light needs to be very bright, appear infinitely far away, have the proper color temperature and color rendering, and recreate atmospheric scattering. I used a recycled Fresnel lens, a 500w LED, and some waterproof inkjet transparency film to successfully build the light.

commercially available artificial skylight

Example of an artificial skylight made by the company Coelux

3D render of my design

3D model I designed of the assembly

The full build

The light I made 

Front view of sky panel

My light working (!)

The No. 2 resource on the radius of the colosseum (watch out Wikipedia).

Skeeball Machine

Full machine

This is a group project with me and two other people. We built a full size Skeeball machine from scratch. I mostly did the electronics but helped with the fabrication. The finished machine has a scoring system, display, animations, sound effects, and keeps a persistent high score. The GitHub for the project is here.

Track framing
Sensor on back of scoreboard
Ramp framing
Scoring holes in progress

Hobbies

Hiking

Beat saber

Kite flying

Knot tying

Drawing fancy hats

Making people read lists

Speed typing (120wpm 😎)

D&D

Anki (Mandarin, Math)

Air plants