I’m Derek Welty: electrical engineer, systems lead, and increasingly the person in my apartment who wires things together until they behave. Thirteen years of hardware so far: consumer electronics, defense systems and networking gear.
This site is my notebook, a technical build log. Raspberry Pis, Home Assistant, HDMI capture, small Python tools, local services, automation glue, and the occasional website plumbing. The posts are written after the work, while the sharp edges are still fresh.
Most of the code in these posts was written by an AI agent, usually Claude Code, with me directing each move. I’ve done software engineering before, mostly test automation frameworks and practical scripts. Here my part is the ideas, the design and results review, and the hardware in the loop: the agent writes, I put the result on the real device, measure it, and tell it what the hardware said. Every post ends with what the agent did, what I did, and what was tested. How I work has the longer version.
The goal is not polished tutorials. It is enough context to rebuild the thing later: what hardware I used, what commands mattered, what failed, what logs explained the failure, and what I would change next time.