TREVOR HILLARD

Check Out Some Projects

Standing Desk

I've wanted a standing desk for a long time, especially in college. I'd spend so much time sitting in class, sitting studying, sitting playing video games, I just wanted to stand some. However, being in college, I didn't have the money to buy one, plus it seemed like it wouldn't be that complicated to build one. So one Christmas break I bought wood from the hardware store and linear actuators from Amazon, and my dad and I went to work. It took a couple days with staining the wood and everything, but honestly not much time to assemble, more time sketching out and planning how it would go together. We don't always follow the rule of measure twice, cut once, but we did in this case.
My dad had the foresight to design it to take apart pretty easily as I was driving a little '02 Honda Civic at the time, and I didn't have much of a truck. I got it back to college and set it all up, and it worked great. I was able to break up how I used my computer, for less than half of what it would have cost to buy one. The one thing I hadn't thought of were locks for the actuators, so after time I ended up mostly burning them out from the constant load on them. But, engineering is all about trial and error, and learning from the mistakes, so now I know what to do better next time.
And yes, I know in the last picture it looks like I have a lot of wires, and I do. I didn't exactly use to prioritize cable management, but I've gotten better.

Hand drawn sketch of the standing desk design The actuators One leg assembled Stained leg Assembling w/ IKEA kitchen counter top Finished desk, messy wiring

Wedding Voicemail Phone

I got married back in October of 2022 and several months prior in all of the planning, my now wife and I were trying to figure out how we wanted guests to leave their mark. We considered just a simple wedding book, I had previously gone to a wedding where they had a polaroid camera and everyone took a picture, which I really loved so we thought about that. However, I think it was her that saw an advertisement for a voicemail classic phone where guests just pick it up, can leave whatever messages, and then you have those audio files for ever. That seemed like a really great idea that neither of knew anyone who had done it yet, so we got to be unique in it. Looking into it however, you could only rent the phones, and even then it was several hundred dollars for the weekend. My wife, knowing that I like to be DIY, asked if I could just make it, and to her surprise I said yes.
A YouTube search later I find a pretty in depth tutorial on how to build one, as well as software that would only need some slight modification. I had her find a phone, which we went with a kind of Victorian style, we loved the look of it and it fit in the decor better than others. Luckily I my alma mater has a facility called '1819' that has a workshop with all the tools you could ever need, so I was able to use that. I went to work taking it apart, figuring out where the circuits were that I had to tap into, and then spliced out wires from the bottom of it. I wanted to house the Teensy board that would run the software in the base of the phone, but due to space I settled on an external box. I played around on tinkerCAD to design the box, and then had 1819 print me a couple copies till I got it right.
Integration actually took longer than expected, there were some bugs in the code, and the I had to figure out the sensitivity of the hardware. I got a large portable battery to power the electronics, and got it all working the week of the wedding. Definitely later than I had planned, but hey, wedding planning is stressful, and it worked, for less than half the cost of renting. As an added benefit, we actually get to keep it, and have floated the idea of renting it out to other people for their weddings to recoup some cost, and give friends a way cheaper alternative to the rental companies.

Breadboard testing 3D printed container box Completed Wedding Phone on Display

Father/Son Car Restoration

I had the privledge of being born into a car family; My dad has been working on and restoring classic cars for decades, so when it came time for me to buy a car he wanted to do a father/son restoration build while we both had the time in life.
So at the age of 14 with money I had saved up from years of working in his body shop, I bought a rough 1970 Nova. At 20 feet it honestly didn't look bad. It was an old drag car, and as we tore into it, we discovered that more and more.
Three years of hard work later, the only original metal on the car is the roof and the firewall, and I have helped build something that I will treasure for the rest of my life. The various lessons that car taught me, from some welding experience, to patience, and balancing a project budget is invaluable.
That car is why I decided to become an electrical engineer. My father threw the 16 year old a wire harness and said figure it out. I fell in love with wiring from that project and decided that for college that I'd pursue electrical engineering.
To this day, that car is the number one thing I look forward to whenever I can go back and visit my parents from college. I know many will never get to experience driving a classic car, but it is a euphoria like no other.
To see more of the car and what other projects my dad is up to, check out another one of my projects, Poboyz.co, which is the first website I built, so my father's business could have an online presence.

In shop Trunk removed rear quarter removed Painting gauges Wiring dash All done

Wired Client's Restoration Builds

After wiring my own car went well, my dad let me wire the next couple client's vehicles to earn additional money in high school. I got to wire up a '57 Chevy Bel-Air' as well as 1968 Ford pickup that I did in Dec. 19'. Proud to say after troubleshooting, both vehicles work as intended. Unfortunately I can't find better pictures of the project. Now that I'm over an hour from my folks though, I don't really get to help my dad build cars anymore. He plans on doing an electric car conversion on a '65 Nova wagon, so I hope to help with that in a few years.

Dash of 68 Ford Original Fuses of 68 Ford Dash of 68 Ford w/ new wiring

Websites

Another pet project that takes up my time is actually this site, and others. I first got my feet wet building my father's website, Poboyz.co. To do that, I used WordPress with a some custom code I learned along the way. I'm still refining that site to this day and I have a pipeline of improvements I want to do with it.
The second site I did was the one you're reading now. For my own website I wanted to build it from scratch, just raw HTML, CSS, and Java to really sharpen up on coding experience. My first iteration was plain html with some css, however for the second build I wanted it to actually look nice. I found out about Astro, so I decided to rebuild it using Astro. I'm still learning Astro, but I'm happy with the results so far. There are still several things I want to add to the site (such as a dark/light button) but, in trying to work on launching things before they are perfect, the site is launched as is, and I'll add to it later. I've learned that if I wait until the product is perfect to my standards, it'll never be a launched product. I mean my plain HTML was online for years, to be fair to myself. If you have any suggestions feel free to let me know, reach out on LinkedIn or via my email.

This website's first iteration Poboyz.co top bar Poboyz.co 'Completed Dreams'

Smart Home

Finally, I like to play around with smart home tech a lot, and have built up my collection over the last 4-5 years. I don't currently have good photos to display, I'll add those when I redo some of my setup. I have Philips Hue and Nanoleaf Essentials bulbs in most of the apartment that are controlled via Siri, automations, and connected buttons. I also have sensors rigged up in various entry points and rooms to detect entry and motion. One of my favorite automations I made is in the night when our master bath door is opened, the lights come on only to 1%, this way I'm not blinded or awaken too much from having to use the bathroom. I also have smart locks set up as I hate coming home with groceries and fumbing for keys, which their responsiveness could be improved, but all in all they aren't bad. I recently bought Home Assistant's Yellow board which has support for Matter as well as every other smart home protocol, but I'm waiting on the Raspberry Pi shortage to go away so I can get my hands on a CM4 without paying triple to a scalper. I've thought about making a YouTube channel showing all my routines and devices, which I may finally do once I own a house. Renting really keeps me from going too crazy with modifications.
With all the new AI tools launched I am going to revisit my childhood dream of a having a JARVIS type system running my house. I'm going to work on a natural language processing system that will at first be able to take commands via text then work on voice. Ultimately I want to be able to connect Siri to it, but instead of using Apple's rather not great NLP, I want it to use mine, and get the props of running a custom name and maybe even synthesize Paul Bettany's voice. I'm not sure if I'll ever get to that point, but it's a fun project to work on in my free time. With any luck I'll work through enough of my project idea list to really put focus into it.