Hi, I'm Leo. Welcome to my Website!

some stuff about me...

I'm currently an Electrical Engineer working on Brain Interfaces for Neuralink, living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was born in Germany and grew up in a small town near Heilbronn, only moving to the US in 2024. I started tinkering with electronics as early as I can remember, and this obsession has only grown since then.

Me, 2024 Yosemite — a little road trip I took after finishing my internship.

my background...

In high school, I built a device that would trick the motor controller of my Bosch ebike, unlocking its speed limit, and posted that on YouTube. To my surprise, quite a few people were interested in it. After that, I started building more and more projects, like my own electric skateboard, posting all of it on my YouTube channel.

After graduating from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do until a small startup working on small electric vehicles called "BrakeForceOne GmbH" reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do an internship with them. I said yes and ended up working there for roughly 2 years before deciding that I should probably go to University and get a degree.

While in university, I obviously kept building things and also got the chance to work at Tesla, first at Giga Berlin when it was just a mud pit, and later remotely did an internship for Palo Alto working on testing hardware. I graduated from the University of Heilbronn of Applied Sciences with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering early 2024. Here are some of the things I built. Some were for school, and some were just for fun.

small PCB projects

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.

eBike BLE controller

This was not just one quick project but rather something that just kept evolving over time. I built a very simple and bad eBike and eBike controller first and started adding more features over the years. A vehicle controller is a device that reads all sensors and vehicle data and controls everything from the motor to the lights and the brakes. This eBike was capable of pedal assist and regenerative braking. While it had two brake levers, one of them was a purely electric rear brake. I also built a native Android app that would instantly connect to the controller via BLE and display all the relevant data like speed, distance, battery percentage, and so on.

smaller fun projects

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 don't 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.

my eboard build

So this is my electric skateboard project. I started working on my electric skateboard when I was in high school, but the project you are seeing here is the second big iteration and a complete redesign. I welded the batteries myself with a spot welder 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 favorite part though was actually the fact that not only the battery and motor controller casing but also the wheel pulleys were 3D printed. And of course, I made a YouTube video about it.

the anti-spark

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 an 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 weird things like XT90 Antispark Loops that just made the problem even more annoying. That's 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. All my projects were running this PCB. And I even sold a few on some forums.

Now there are a plenty more things that I built before and during college but I feel like this should give you a pretty good overview of my early projects. I've started to focus on bigger more professional ideas towards the end because I ultimately don't just want to build random small things that are kinda neat but actually great products and technology that actually helps people and makes a big difference. Which is certainly not easy. But I feel like I'm on the right path.