S.L.E.D.G.E.

Senior capstone. Garrick Hogrebe (Principal Engineer) had already laid the foundation — LED control logic, FFT-based music adaptation, a working beta app. Bradley Chu and I came in as the app team: my role was Project Manager / Computer Engineer, and together Bradley and I took that beta and pushed it to a full-release Android app that actually felt intuitive to use.

The system itself is an ESP32 driving addressable LED strips — real-time audio signal processing via Fourier transforms that map frequency bands to light. The physical output: a set of hexagonal LED panels, modular and clean enough to actually want on a shelf. Garrick built the core engine. Bradley and I built the experience around it.

My focus was the Android app — Bluetooth pairing, UI flow, making sure someone who'd never seen it before could pick it up and use it without us standing next to them. That consumer-first mindset is something I'd carried over from Teradyne, and this was the first time I got to apply it to something I could actually show people.