Hi, I'm Leo. Welcome to my Website!
Some stuff about me...
I'm currently an Electrical Engineer for Neuralink, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Germany and grew up in a small town near Heilbronn. I came to the US in 2024 for an internship that turned into a full-time job.
Me, 2024 Yosemite — a little road trip I did after finishing my internship.
Things I built
I graduated from the University of Heilbronn of Applied Sciences with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering last year. In my free time, I like to build things. Here are some of the things that I made. Some were for school, and some were just for fun.
This was my Bachelor Thesis project. A precision low-cost emitter current controller that can measure its own brightness and self-calibrate. This was a PCB design I made for Vishay Semiconductor GmbH.
An attempt at making 60V batteries compatible with USB-C Bi-Directional Charging. I really badly wanted to charge my eBike with my laptop charger while also being able to use my eBike battery as a HUGE laptop power bank.
I played around a bit with haptic feedback for a while. I wanted to create a game that you play by simply waving a controller around. What inspired me for this project was the "guess how many marbles" minigame in Mario Party, where the Switch controller simulates marbles inside your controller, and just by shaking it, you need to figure out how many are inside. For this, I ordered the haptic engine of the Switch from AliExpress and started tinkering with it. I'm driving the haptic engine with an H-Bridge Motor Driver. I built a ratchet simulator and started work on a game where you can simply bounce a ping pong ball on a racket, and the controller would simulate the racket and the ball.
And the other spinny thing is literally a fidget spinner that I wanted to be able to place on a holder that spins it when you dont have time to spin it. It was a patented breakthrough invention that ended up saving humanity. It uses a small hall effect sensor and a microcontroller to drive the coil out of a door lock.
So this is my electric skateboard project. I started working on my electric skateboard when I was in highschool but the project you are seeing here is the second big iteration and a complete redesign. I welded the batteries myself with a spotwelder I made out of a microwave transformer. The remote is originally from Solidgeek and I forked his firmware so that the remote shows things like speed and battery percentage as well as odometer.
My favourite part though was actually the fact that not only the battery and motor controller casing but also the wheel pulleys were 3D printed.
Ok, so this is a project that I made over quite a long time. I had to build this because at that time no Good Anti-Sparks existed that you could buy. You might be wondering "what is a antispark?" well, let me explain: The current through a capacitor is the derivative of its Voltage. So imagine a switch connecting a big battery to a motor controller with big capacitors. When turning that thing on without parasitics you basically have a step signal which in return would create infinite current. In reality its not infinite current but its enough to blow up any real switches and transistors. So how do you avoid blowing up your switch, well people started building all kinds of wierd things like XT90 Antispark Loops that just made the problem even more annoying. Thats where my softstart Antispark came in. At this point there are really great softstart antisparks out there that you can just buy. But at that time I had to invent my own, and I of course open sourced the design.
You can see how it started off as a breadboard design and later turned into an actual PCB. I was quite proud of the PCB at the time because it was the first PCB I basically fully made from scratch. Meaning I had a problem, figured out a solution, designed the schematic for it and built the PCB.
How I studied and worked during college
Lastly, I'd love to show you how I studied. Now, this seems kinda mundane to many, but I think anyone who enjoys a nice setup like me, will appreciate this. My setup consisted of an iPad, the cheapest one, 6th gen. Later, I swapped it out for a used Onyx Note Air 2. And my Razer Blade 2021 that I bought used. For general electronics work, I mainly got my hands on anything used or cheap. Microscope and power supply from AliExpress. Other stuff from online classifieds advertisement websites. Developing electronics is not cheap, so some creativity is always required to build anything.
So they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus a 3D-Scan must be worth a million. So here is my full Room 3D scanned for you to explore. There are so many custom things I built in there, I'd love to go over everything but that would be a bit too much.
So I'm still adding stuff to this website, so pls come back later for more stuff.