About the Designer

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest — born in a remote area of western Washington, graduated high school in Montana, then off to Texas and New Mexico before planting roots in Oregon in 2002. I picked up a soldering iron at age seven and never really put it down. I've found joy in a combination of being outdoors combined with technical roles anywhere from repairing cellular equipment at the bottom of remote towers to electronics repair for oil field exploration — all before finding my footing in the automation and robotics world, where I've spent the last 24 years programming robots and vision systems, assembling and testing motion controllers, teaching, engineering, and eventually moving into sales — though I still do much of the hands-on technical work for my customers because honestly, that's the part I love most.

Evenings and weekends have always been tinkering time. Microcontrollers, home improvement gadgets, little devices built for family and friends — the kind of projects that scratch an itch and make life a little better. woodTracks started the same way: a problem I couldn't stop thinking about around an elk campfire, a few months of late nights, and an idea that kept getting better with every iteration. At some point it stopped being a personal project and started feeling like something other people deserved to have too — and here we are.

The communication stack at the heart of woodTracks is built on the same design philosophy I've used for two decades connecting robots, cameras, and motion controllers: keep the data human-readable, keep the architecture simple, and make it easy to debug at 2am in the field. That background shaped every decision in this product, from the packet format to the encryption model to the repeater protocol. woodTracks is the most personal thing I've ever built — and the most useful.