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Various photos from the Lakehouse

Sergei and his lovely wife, Anna, in front of the lakehouse.

My wife Anna and I on a sunny day.

One of my first projects: 3D-printing four goban (board to play Go game) legs. They look almost like real ivory. It's not just plastic — there's an aluminium core inside for stability and longevity.

Early 3D print of a motorcycle, consisting of over 40 detailed parts. I had a tight schedule, so for a week I slept near my first 3D printer to make sure all the parts would be ready in time.

Fixing a security camera isn't a big deal, but you still need to know the basics of soldering — especially what to desolder and replace. Otherwise you'll end up trying multiple components with little success.

To identify the problem, you can use a thermal camera. Nowadays almost no real repair can be done without one, so you need to know how to use it.

Cars are fascinating — a lot of engineering is hidden to make such a huge mechanism work properly. Modern cars, unfortunately, are becoming quite restrictive when it comes to self-maintenance. That's why we have an old one to show how it should work. What could be better than getting under the hood or replacing a tire yourself? :) Not for everyone, but it really shows how the modern world works and what kind of machinery we're dealing with every day without even thinking about it. Knowing that encourages you to drive safer, because you learn to appreciate those tons of metal and engineering marvels.

We live in a sunny climate, so installing solar panels is an obvious choice — but not so fast. You really need to consider a few factors like price per kWh, installation costs, and storage. But it gives you an idea of how to deal with high-voltage systems and the actual professional installation of outdoor equipment, which is prone to weather degradation and must withstand the hurricanes we have here.

Even though it's easier these days to have a contractor pick the equipment for you, you should never do that — because after installation the maintenance is all on you. To keep the lifetime cost of the system low, you need to be curious enough to pick the right one that fits your needs and won't lock you into any particular vendor for life. Also, calculating how much you'll need is a serious matter, but as a result you become the owner of your home's electric system, and it's worth the time spent.

This picture looks intimidating, but it's the evolution of the electric system in our house. To avoid getting lost in it, it's better to know the ins and outs from top to bottom — and it's not as hard as most people think. Basic electrical safety and a bit of curiosity will allow you not to fear the unknown, but to methodically follow the procedures to protect yourself and eliminate one fear from the surrounding world, because fear of the unknown is the most dangerous and counter-productive one.

And to start, you can always try something simple — like replacing a switch. Just take your time figuring out which breaker to turn off, then trace the wires. Now you've saved yourself $200–$300 and feel more confident in what you're doing.

The fireplace project was quite complex: it's a modification of a cheap fireplace by adding an OLED screen connected to a Raspberry Pi and rendering a dynamic UE5 Niagara fluids fire simulation from your workstation into a stream via WiFi onto a thin RPi client. That's one fun way of how you can get a nice and cozy spot for your Christmas stockings :)

Building the fireplace surroundings is also a great example of a hands-on project: you need to design the support structure, build it precisely, install and embed it into the wall along with its electrics, and apply veneer and tile properly so it looks professional — because you only get one chance.

This is a nice little project: an animatronic headslug. It looks cute, but inside...

Inside the headslug plushie there's a bunch of PCBs, a bone-conductive speaker (so it can "talk" via telepathy when sitting on your head), a battery, and a servo motor to make it move. This is a complicated project that combines multiple disciplines including design, 3D printing, soldering, and embedded software development — which requires a ton of knowledge about how all of this works...

Yeah, there are tons of wires inside! Another cool feature is that a couple of headslugs can actually sense each other via a WiFi access point and start a game to control their hosts!

WiFi is nowadays in every home, but sometimes you need a robust and secure backbone to handle security footage, multiple smart devices, and a ton of laptops and mobile phones. Managing all that is quite complex and it makes a half of all IT infrastructure issues. When you just touch its surface it looks easy, but the deeper you go you start to figure out that the bits aren't just going to the right place — they actually follow a complex set of rules to reach their destination. Owning and controlling your home's network is crucial in the modern world, where every device tries to collect your personal data and send it out. It's a solid foundation of knowledge that raises awareness of the weak security in modern society.

Another important topic is the HVAC system — without it you get mold everywhere and can't sleep well because it's too hot, or you suddenly wake up in the morning because it's too cold. There's nothing pleasant about calling and paying an AC specialist twice a year, especially when fixing your cooling breaks the heating. In fact, it's not rocket science to know the components and how they work together to identify an issue and fix it properly once and for all. You don't have to suffer and pay too much money for something that should just work.

Another topic with HVAC systems is how to make your house comfortable everywhere — and zoning actually helps here. It also comes with a very particular set of challenges to overcome to make it useful, and it's very tough for a regular AC engineer to even connect everything correctly. So it's an advanced level, but once you get it, no HVAC system will ever bully you again.

That's how my lab looks — it contains everything needed for automatic additive and subtractive manufacturing. Of course there are tons of tools to bring any idea to real life.

A bit of an old photo from when I reverse-engineered the Snapdragon devboard for an AR-glasses project — there's no way to do such tasks without a proper microscope.

Sometimes you need four extra pairs of hands to figure out what's happening inside these tiny phones. A digital analyzer does most of the heavy lifting, but it's still up to the engineer to interpret what the data bits are doing.

Recently I got a quote of ,000 from the manufacturer to fix my laptop. Instead I disassembled it and, using my trusty thermal camera, found a tiny capacitor that had died from power injection. After one hour of work and the faulty capacitor replacement, my laptop is back and very much alive.

Sometimes you find a really nice piece of tech, but it's quite restrictive in how it operates — it always requires you to use their app via the cloud. Instead you can learn how to access the hardware, capture the Bluetooth protocol, and connect it to virtually anything, like a local Home Assistant. That's not just useful for security, but also fun and teaches you new tricks.

CNCs are particularly demanding when it comes to your CAD knowledge. With 3D printers you can just draw a 3D model by hand and it'll be fine, but CNC requires precision that can only be achieved with strict measurements. To make such a train wheel you need accurate measurements and you need to know how Boolean non-destructive 3D design works, then use CNC tools to manufacture it repeatedly — it's as close as you can get to real-life manufacturing at home today.

It's not a big deal to solder a bunch of button boards together and connect them to a microcontroller devboard — but it's much harder to prepare the embedded software that makes it work as a USB MIDI controller with the logic you want. But it's 100% possible.

Recent addition to my manufacturing stack is a milling machine: you need a tool like this to achieve precision that's impossible with regular hand tools. Tuning, learning, and using such a machine is very rewarding, because you're touching the very essence of precision and what it means to create details through exact and sophisticated processes.

One day I thought: why not take a stereo camera and attach it to the phone? That led me deep into Android app development, the complications of 3D scanning, and processing point clouds — especially on not-so-performant hardware. Every idea is a journey, and you never know what it will reveal along the way.

When I decided to learn piano, I found a nice YouTube channel where a guy played with his keys lit up — and it looked pretty cool. So my piano also has MIDI output via USB, and using an ESP32 I connected an addressable RGB LED strip to the notes. I can also connect my phone via Bluetooth and have the LED strip highlight the notes I need to play. That was done, but yeah, I'm still not a great piano player :)

Not all projects have to be difficult — something easy like a mosaic can also give you a ton of design fun and details to work on. For example, you don't want to cut yourself while swimming, so you prepare the edges with a file. But you shouldn't inhale these tiny glass particles, so you wear proper protection and use water to capture most of them. And not to mention it has to hang on a pool wall, so you use mesh and proper grout to embed it so it stays there for a long time and brings you joy every day.

The pool is not just a fun activity, but also a complex ecosystem that can teach you chemistry and automation like nothing else. And to make it work reliably and worry-free, you need to know it — because even professional pool builders may struggle with something like that.

Once in a while you can't just reverse-engineer the PCB, so you need to look inside it. This picture is a bit complex, but it shows a combination of a regular photo of the PCB and an X-ray scan of its part. Now it's relatively easy to figure out where these small traces are going and what's happening under the chips.

Making a table — what could be easier? But a table with RGB lights on adjustable legs is a completely different story. Power distribution is just one of many little problems you have to solve...

In the end you get a nice pink (or any other color) table. Isn't that nice?

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Lakehouse Mentorship

Premium one-on-one mentorship that blends tech mastery, hands-on making, and life wisdom. Based at a serene lakehouse in Clermont, FL.

Clermont, FL · Orlando Area

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