About

Hardware builds, tinkering, and how-to guides.

ELK Labs is named for my three kids — Evelyn, Leo, and Kenna. The lab is in the basement: a workbench, a soldering iron, a shelf of Raspberry Pi boards, and whatever Arduino Nanos or peculiar eBay finds have accumulated since the last time I cleaned up. One of them wanders down occasionally to see what I'm building.

By day I'm a software developer. I've spent long enough writing code that I have strong instincts about keeping things simple and maintainable — and I've found it genuinely fun to find out which of those instincts hold up when the thing you're building has actual wires in it.

The projects lean retro. A 3D-printed CRT-shaped cabinet running RetroPie. A 1920s Kellogg wooden wall phone wired to a Raspberry Pi. A theremin built in fifteen minutes on a rainy afternoon. Things that feel like they belong in 1985, built with modern hardware and tooling. That contrast — nostalgia plus craft — is a recurring thread through pretty much everything here.

What's here

Build guides — hardware projects with a full write-up: what to build, what parts you need, how to wire it, how to configure the software. Not a polished-product showcase — more "here's the thing I actually made, so you can make it too." Source files and configs are in public repos so you can reproduce them without guessing.

Builds with the kids — some projects start because one of them wandered in and didn't leave. Those posts are still real how-to guides, but they have more of the human side: why we picked the parts, what they thought of it, where it went sideways.

Guides — beginner quickstarts for Raspberry Pi and Arduino: how I personally get from "fresh out of the box" to "something is actually running."

The hardware on the workbench is mostly Raspberry Pi — Zero W, 2B, 4B — plus Arduino Nanos and whatever else drifts in. All project source files, configs, and docs are in public repos at github.com/matt-bey.