Who am I??
I'm Leah: an electrical & computer engineer, hamster enthusiast, and graduate student. I solder breadboards, knit, and add more hamsters to this website.
I'm also a former Bellinghamster: I studied at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
✧ Quick facts ✧
- Species: PhD student
- Current habitat: Ithaca, NY
- Favorite chip: the MOS 6502
- Favorite movie: Withnail and I
- Favorite animated film: The Secret of NIMH
- Comfort show: The X-Files
- Favorite book: Slaughterhouse-Five
- Least favorite book: Flowers for Algernon
- Side quest: reading Make magazine
✧ Trivia ✧
- Every hamster on this site squeaks when you click it.
- Every movable pixel drawing in the museum was done as a tribute to Living Computers in Seattle, which I miss dearly.
- I once ran a computer history trivia night, with pizza and 30 questions to stump my fellow grad students.
- I founded a rocketry club at North Seattle College.
- The terminal on the home page knows more commands than it admits.
Projects: Hardware
6502 Computer
in progress6502breadboardA computer built from scratch on breadboards around the 6502 CPU, following Ben Eater's 6502 computer project.
Tape-Measure Yagi Antenna
pausedRFYagiSDRDIYA homemade directional Yagi antenna built from PVC pipe and tape-measure elements, paired with an RTL-SDR USB dongle for software-defined radio.
Project paused because I got too emotionally attached to the tape measure.
Tiny Tapeout: 6-bit Shift Register
in fabricationASICTiny TapeoutWokwiMy project from my first Tiny Tapeout workshop: a simple 6-bit shift register with toggle-enabled feedback, currently being manufactured on a real chip. It fits in a single 1×1 tile and has clock, reset, and two data inputs driving six outputs.
[GitHub] [Wokwi design]
Projects: Software
gwark.dev
livewebFour browser tools that each do one thing: Paperstack for PDFs, openlabbench for hardware pinouts and part swaps, roboticsbench for robotics math you can watch move, and eigenwave for learning the Fourier transform.
StartIpsum
livewebHelps students find startup funding competitions, accelerators, incubators, and hackathons.
StrippedRecipes
livewebPaste a recipe link and get just the ingredients and steps, without the life story.
Lens Media Lab Project Pages
livelegacymachine learningWeb tools built for Yale IPCH's Lens Media Lab, among them the semi-supervised triplet-loss texture matcher for photographic papers. Revived after the lab closed in 2025, so not everything works the way it once did.
✧ Throwback projects ✧
- Star tracker (senior project): a self-led robotic star-tracking device, with my own PCB (EAGLE), CAD, and embedded C
- Underwater ROV (WWU Marine Technology Club): helped design a vehicle for the MATE International ROV Competition
- NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars: lead programmer on the winning robot team at Johnson Space Center
- Rocket payload: designed telemetry payload casings with SolidWorks, 3D printing, and laser cutting, and founded North Seattle College's Rocketry Club