System Design

My home automation dashboard broke down in two ways this year. Hardware, then software. My wife and I really liked this dashboard. It saved us from pulling out our phones and getting sucked into emails or social media while we were supposed to be living our lives.

Both breakdowns ended up in rebuilds. The hardware obviously solved by 3D modeling and printing and the software part became another problem I would vibe code - no - vibe engineer - my way out of.

After rebuilding, it is totally different. But cooler perhaps? And everything it uses should last many decades this time, instead of just one decade.

The Answering Machine is a proof-of-concept system that I built using pre-LLM natural language processing (NLP), specifically NLTK, to produce answers to questions asked about data in plain English.

Looking back, this project was a great insight into what LLMs immediately allowed that was incredibly difficult before. This project was several months of work that the openAI sdk would probably have allowed in a few weeks - and that few weeks would have been mostly frontend design and a bit of prompting.

Try it here: http://voicequery-dev.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ Github: https://github.com/hockenmaier/voicequery

The system uses natural language processing to produce answers to questions asked about data in plain English.

Land War is an 8-player strategy game I developed as a solo project and released to Steam in March of 2019.
This game was intended to have low art requirements and simple interaction rules that result in deep strategic gameplay.

The core concept is that of an ultra-simplified real-time-strategy game. Each player is represented by a color and can grow their territory by moving in any direction. The strategic elements occur when players encounter other players and have to make choices about which side of their land to defend or give up. Players can use the structure of the map and the coordinated action of other players to gain defensible footholds in order to take more area and eventually be the last player on the board.

Raspberry Pi Control Panel is a hardware project I designed in 2016 to manage home automation systems. The project involved designing a custom 3D-printed case for a Raspberry Pi microcomputer with a touchscreen interface.

Links:

• GitHub
• Thingiverse