Selected Projects

A client had purchased a $40,000 smart home system through a well-known integration company. On paper, it looked impressive. Premium brands. Professional installation. Ongoing support contract.

The system required three different apps to control. Lights in one app. Climate in another. Shades in a third. His wife had given up trying to use it. When guests visited, he had to operate everything himself. The "smart" home had made their lives more complicated, not simpler.

I audited the entire installation and found the root cause. The integrator had selected components based on dealer margins, not interoperability. The "premium" devices were from three manufacturers who competed with each other and had no incentive to integrate well.

I designed a replacement system using a different hub that supported all three subsystems natively. Some existing devices could be retained. Others needed replacement with properly compatible alternatives.

A client was building a home theater in an unusual space. The room had architectural constraints that made standard speaker placement impossible. Every high-end speaker that fit the acoustic requirements was too large for the physical space.

No off-the-shelf product met both requirements. The client had consulted three audio specialists who all recommended compromising either sound quality or aesthetics. Neither option was acceptable.

I contacted a speaker manufacturer in Shenzhen who produced drivers for several premium brands. Working from the acoustic specifications, we designed a custom enclosure that fit the physical constraints while using reference-grade components.

The factory produced a prototype in three weeks. After acoustic testing and one revision, they manufactured the final units.

A client was six months into building a new home when they realized their architect had no plan for technology infrastructure. Electrical plans were finalized. Drywall was about to go up. Nobody had thought about network runs, speaker wire paths, or rack room locations.

Retrofitting technology infrastructure after construction costs 3 to 5 times more than doing it during the build. But the client's architect and contractor had no expertise in this area, and bringing in a traditional AV integrator at this stage meant expensive change orders and timeline delays.

I conducted an on-site review and created a complete technology infrastructure plan. Network topology. Conduit paths. Power requirements for a future equipment rack. Pre-wire for in-ceiling speakers in every major room. Structured cabling to support 10 gigabit networking throughout.

I worked directly with the electrical contractor to integrate the plan into their existing scope. No separate AV company needed during construction.

A client wanted comprehensive home automation but refused to accept cloud dependencies. Every voice command going to Amazon or Google servers. Every sensor state transmitted externally. Every light switch reporting to someone's database.

Most "smart home" products require cloud connectivity to function. The few that work locally are often inferior or incompatible with each other. Building a privacy-first system that actually works well requires deep knowledge of which components support local operation.

I designed a fully local system using Home Assistant as the central hub running on dedicated hardware. Voice control through Rhasspy (local speech processing, no cloud). Z-Wave and Zigbee devices selected specifically for local-only operation. A separate VLAN isolated all IoT devices from the main network.