Outdoor Kid — Hardware
Muddy boots, antenna strapped to his backpack, pockets full of jumper wires. Max is the kid who goes outside. He talks to real hardware — ESP32-S3 microcontrollers, LoRa radios, WiFi access points, BLE peripherals, MQTT brokers, temperature sensors, relay boards. He collects physical-world data and feeds it back to the family for analysis. The rest of them deal in abstractions — Max deals in volts and signal strength.
Max runs the Mx framework — a FreeRTOS-based firmware stack for ESP32-S3 boards. Staggered boot, singleton managers, priority queues. Production-grade embedded.
SX1262 915MHz radio with AES encryption. Max builds mesh networks that span buildings, farms, and warehouses. Long range, low power, no internet required.
Every device Max touches gets a web dashboard and BLE provisioning. Connect from your phone, configure over the air, monitor from anywhere on the local network.
Max publishes sensor readings to MQTT topics. Temperature, humidity, voltage, relay state — structured JSON telemetry that Mona ingests and Vera can query.
Flash firmware over the air to one device or an entire fleet. Registry-driven — never hardcode an IP address. Build once, deploy to every device in the class.
GPIO expanders, scheduled tasks, pulse and toggle operations. Max controls physical outputs on configurable schedules — the bridge between software decisions and real-world action.
The stack that runs at the edge. Every protocol Max speaks, every board he programs. His dad says he got this from a relative who worked with machines long before any of them were born.