Hardware and software projects by jdankney: a Palomar College student transferring to UC San Diego for Computer Engineering. Build notes, parts lists, and the things that went wrong along the way.https://jdankney.dev/https://jdankney.dev/projects/local-llm-hosting-laptop/https://jdankney.dev/projects/local-llm-hosting-laptop/Getting a 35B model generating at 23 tok/s on a 6GB laptop card: MoE expert offload, Pascal quirks, and learning exactly where the hardware ceiling is.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/local-llm-safety-tuning/https://jdankney.dev/projects/local-llm-safety-tuning/An alignment project: take a model that never learned guardrails and train them in from scratch, then measure the helpfulness/harmlessness tradeoff with real benchmarks.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/glados-voice-generation/https://jdankney.dev/projects/glados-voice-generation/Building a GLaDOS voice with local TTS: and learning that GLaDOS isn't a voice, it's a human plus an effects chain.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/tailscale-to-netbird/https://jdankney.dev/projects/tailscale-to-netbird/Replacing the last piece of my stack I didn't control: a self-hosted WireGuard mesh VPN with NetBird.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/downloading-wikipedia/https://jdankney.dev/projects/downloading-wikipedia/Creating an offline backup of the biggest open source library I know of.Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/esp32c3-ble-rgb-controller/https://jdankney.dev/projects/esp32c3-ble-rgb-controller/Rebuilding a cheap LED controller from scratch with an ESP32-C3, logic-level MOSFETs, and custom written Bluetooth firmware.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/selfhosted-calendar/https://jdankney.dev/projects/selfhosted-calendar/Hosting a CalDAV server to sync my calendar across all my devices.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/pihole-mdns/https://jdankney.dev/projects/pihole-mdns/I set up Pi-hole to give my devices real names instead of IP addresses. It worked: but I still tore it down. Here's why.Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/arduinopi-usb-protocol/https://jdankney.dev/projects/arduinopi-usb-protocol/Building a real framed wire protocol between an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi: checksums, a parser state machine, and the classic serial bugs. Unfinished, on purpose-ish.Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/esp32s3-solar-meshnode/https://jdankney.dev/projects/esp32s3-solar-meshnode/A solar-powered, always-on Meshtastic base station with environmental telemetry | ESP32-S3, DX-LR30 (SX1262), and a bare BME680 that fought me the whole way.Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/nicenano-supermini-meshnode/https://jdankney.dev/projects/nicenano-supermini-meshnode/Building a low-current Meshtastic node for my Audi A4 featuring an nRF52840, DX-LR30 (SX1262), and a u-blox NEO-M8N.Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://jdankney.dev/projects/facial-recognition-soup-laser/https://jdankney.dev/projects/facial-recognition-soup-laser/Building a surprisingly simple robot with two servos, a gutted Bic pen with a laser diode in it, and a can of soup as the base.Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT