About

I’m Daniel. By day I build and fine-tune scientific instruments at a small company in Charlottesville, Virginia: laser-based analyzers that measure the gas inside sealed pharmaceutical vials without opening them. Before that I installed car stereos, ran grocery departments and managed a pizza shop, and in between I went back to school for a degree in industrial electronics. The résumé has the formal version.

The rest of the time I make things. Three 3D printers, one of which has had every part replaced, with a fourth waiting its turn. A basement rack of servers that holds the family photos, runs the smart home and watches the cameras. Small circuit boards scattered through the house doing one job each: talking to the ceiling fans, opening the garage, measuring the electricity. A phone app, because the one I was paying for stopped being worth it. Instruments, in the musical sense. A garden.

In 2026 we moved to a house in the woods outside Charlottesville, which explains the fans with lost remotes, the long driveway that needed a camera, and the garage door that learned to open itself. The house has a full set of animals, who appear in the photos but not by name.

About this site

This site is for three kinds of people. Fellow makers, who want the part numbers, the firmware settings and the things that went wrong. Friends and family, who want to know what on earth I have been doing in the basement. And anyone who has arrived from my résumé and wants proof. Each project page starts with the short version and keeps the detail underneath.

There are no ads, no tracking beyond self-hosted analytics (Umami, no third parties), and no comments. If something here helped you, or you spot a mistake, write to contactme@danielabrams.net.

The site is built with Hugo, served from the basement through a small rented server, and its source lives on my own Forgejo. The drawings and the grid are a nod to the engineering drawings I grew up around.