Projects, places & field notes

I build things, go places, and keep notes along the way.

A personal journal about engineering projects, travel, photography, diving, and the practical lessons I want to remember.

One journal, two threads

From the workbench and beyond it.

From the road

Recent travel notes.

Travel journal

Recent experiments

Smaller builds, useful lessons.

Full build archive
LAB-002 / 2025Operational

Homelab

Homelab Observability Stack

A monitoring layer for home servers that answers useful questions without turning the lab into a wall of noisy dashboards.

  • Proxmox
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Ansible
Read build log
EXP-003 / 2025Prototype

Embedded

Edge Vision Sensor Node

An ESP32-S3 camera node that performs local image classification and reports compact events over MQTT.

  • ESP32-S3
  • C++
  • TensorFlow Lite
  • MQTT
Read build log
UNI-004 / 2024Archived

University

Campus Route Planner

A graph-based route planner that compares accessible, sheltered, and fastest paths across a university campus.

  • TypeScript
  • Astro
  • GeoJSON
  • Dijkstra
Read build log

Inside the workshop

Where software meets the physical world.

These are the areas I keep returning to—usually with a screwdriver, a serial cable, or too many browser tabs nearby.

01

AI and automation

Self-hosted agents, local models, and practical tools that make multi-step work easier to see and control.

02

Homelab and networking

Home servers, Docker services, NAS storage, Pi-hole, tunnels, monitoring, and the network that holds it together.

03

Embedded systems

Small computers, LicheeRV Nano experiments, embedded Linux, sensors, FPGA logic, and hardware-software boundaries.

04

Software engineering

C++, object-oriented design, university assignments, web tools, and software built to solve a specific problem.

05

Hardware and PC systems

PC builds, upgrades, repurposed components, troubleshooting, thermals, performance, and learning by taking things apart.

Latest engineering notes

Things worth remembering.

Full journal

A note from Alfred

“I use this site to remember what I built, where I went, what surprised me, and what I would do differently next time.”