About Me

I'm James Ankney, a Computer Engineering student at Palomar College, currently working on transferring to UC San Diego. This site is my workbench notebook: parts lists, wiring diagrams, firmware notes, and an honest record of everything that went right as well as everything that exploded along the way.

It all started back in 2022 with a laser turret built out of a soup can, a webcam, and two servos. It was a Michael Reeves-grade bad idea and it mostly worked, and I've been hooked on building things ever since. These days most of what I make lives somewhere between hardware and software: ESP32 and nRF52840 boards, custom Bluetooth and LoRa firmware, a couple of Meshtastic nodes (one of which rides around in my car), and rebuilding cheap consumer electronics from scratch once the original board inevitably dies.

The other half is software. I run Arch Linux and I've spent numerous hours pulling my digital life onto hardware I actually control: self-hosting my calendar, my media, an offline copy of all of Wikipedia, and eventually the VPN gluing it all together. Lately I've been deep in local AI too: running a 35B model on a laptop GPU that has no business doing it, cloning voices, and a safety fine-tuning project I'm still chipping away at.

A few things I care about: building projects that actually get used instead of shelved, documenting the mistakes as thoroughly as the wins (the Pi-hole writeup is a project I undid, and that's on here on purpose), and picking parts I can actually source again when something breaks. I'm also slowly getting better at not burning out MOSFETs.

If you want to see what I'm currently working on, check out the project log.