Consulting for the full idea-to-market pipeline

Build like a master.

Offering start-to-finish consulting for your projects in electronics, software, firmware, manufacturing robotics, AI, logistics and quality in the automotive, defense, aerospace, medical and general purpose manufacturing industries.

Start a project QMSCompositesAerospaceCADAutomotiveCAM3D PrintingSchematicsRoboticsSoftwareLogisticsC++PrototypingPythonAIJavaScriptLLMsInferenceGraphicsWeb DesignMetal FabricationMaterialsSafetyFirmwareUser InterfacesComplianceHollywood FilmDataFormattingMachine VisionSwiftiOS App DevelopmentMedicalPlasticsCNCRemote ControlsMSDSISO 9001OSHA StandardsIEC 60601-1Lean ManufacturingLaboratoryEfficacy TestingHazmat510(k)ISO 13485

~/paradise — capability.json

disciplinesmech · elec · fw · ux

sectorsmed · def · lab · film

run_size1 – 10,000 units

locationsFL, USA · MNL, PH

lead_time1 week

statusaccepting_work

bench · board bring-up

~/paradise — ventures3 · 2 sub-apps

gcodesentinel.com Machine monitoring that calls before the crash

NC Studio Toolpath editing and post-processing in G-Code Sentinel

halus.ai Applied AI for people who make physical things

Anim Studio Motion and visualisation for hardware teams in halus.ai

boekelsci.com Boekel Scientific — lab instruments built to last

01 — Open source

code, models & support · 3 channels

github.com/BlinkingSun

Maker_In_Paradise — hardware/software for AI, robotics and manufacturing

43 repos · 21 private · 6 pinned

repositories 43

public 22 private 21

pinned

VIEW PROFILE ↗

1,804

contributions · 12 mo

44 days

current streak

44 days

longest streak

206

busiest day

68 / 365

days with commits

stl2step

★26628

Universal STL (mesh) to STEP (B-Rep solid) conversion engine — C++ library + CLI, cross-platform, OpenCASCADE-based.

C++

claude-team-grok-heavy★5

Grok-heavy edition of the Claude Code /team skill: Fable 5 plans & integrates, a persistent Grok 4.5 master audits & tests (up to 5 slaves), up to 10 Grok executors build. Ultracode-like multi-agent coverage while sparing your Claude plan.

Shell

agent-awake

Agents keep your Mac awake while they work — persistent instruction set + Claude Code hooks for AllNighter's agent keep-awake switch

Shell

agent-switchboard★1

A patch panel for your AI agent fleet — derived-liveness lane tracking, event-driven waits, and a live dashboard for 100+ concurrent agents. No polling loops, no silent deaths.

Python

sidecar-rescue-releases

Downloads for Sidecar Rescue — a macOS app that fixes an iPad that won't reconnect as a Sidecar display (source is private)

Releases

sldprt2step★2

Convert .SLDPRT part files to ISO 10303-21 STEP (AP214). Pure Python, standard library only — no CAD kernel, no binaries, no network.

claude-team-grok-heavy

thingiverse.com/Blinkingsun

Free, printable parts from the shop — clips, jigs, fixtures and machine spares

30 designs · 13,231 downloads

BROWSE DESIGNS ↗

Everything I post here is free to download, use and modify. Most of it started as a part I needed on a Tuesday — a fixture that had to exist before the next operation, a spare that was cheaper to print than to wait on. If it saves you an afternoon, that is the whole point.

designs published

13,231

downloads · total

makes posted

collections

12pt BBS RC center cap wrench for VW GLI (2003-2005)/VW 337 GTI (2002)

bbs-centerlock↓ 1.5k

Folgertech FT-5/FT-6 SOLID Bowden (+dual) extruder mount

bowden-extruder↓ 1.2k

Laptop and tablet rack (26mm, 26mm, 12mm)

laptop-organizer↓ 1.1k

BlinkingSun 5015 blower fan modified casings

blower-fan↓ 1.1k

Folgertech FT-6 cable chain system

cable-management↓ 1.1k

Folgertech FT-6 (FT-5?) dual or single parts coolers for direct drive

direct-extruder↓ 755

@BlinkingSun · $BlinkingSun

Tips for the free stuff — every dollar goes to filament, tooling and shop time

paypal · cash app · venmo

Everything in the two channels above is free — the code, the models, no accounts, no paywalls. That doesn't change. But if something here saved you an afternoon and you feel like putting a few dollars toward the next spool, any of the three works. No tiers, no perks, no obligation.

Drawing sheet — capability & project data 10 of 40 packages on file

02 — Capability matrix

1 ■ lead · 2 ▨ advise · 3 □ network

Discipline / phase

Concept

Design

Prototype

DFM

Production

Mechanical & product design

Electrical, embedded & PCB

Software & firmware

Additive & 3D printing

CAD & DFM consulting

Prototyping & short-run fab

tooling: SolidWorks · Fusion 360 · KiCad · Altium · STM32Cube · Rust · Python · Klipper · Mastercam

03 — Project index

6 shown · 40 on file

Open Sidecar RescueClose Sidecar Rescue

SIDECAR RESCUESoftware dev

Sidecar Rescue

Fixes an iPad that won't reconnect as a Sidecar display — restarts the stuck process over USB, no reboot. Signed & notarized, macOS 14+. Download .dmg ↓

Open ONE_BOARDClose ONE_BOARD

ONE_BOARDPCB dev/med

ONE_BOARD

The Raspberry Pi™ of medical… ONE_BOARD is a universal control board developed under strict IEC 60601-1 standards for use in lab equipment and medical devices to support rapid prototyping with the advantage of compliance documentation for design freezes/final production.

Open SolidOutClose SolidOut

SOLIDOUTSoftware dev

SolidOut

Built around stl2step, my open-source mesh-to-STEP engine — flat regions, holes and rounds come back as analytic faces, not triangle soup. Signed & notarized, macOS 26+, Apple silicon. Download .dmg ↓

Photo — 16:9

MIP-0208 REV BOptics

Handheld spectrometer

Palm-sized NIR head with a sealed optical bench and on-device inference.

Photo — 16:9

MIP-0191 REV DLab

Lab centrifuge controller

Closed-loop drive, imbalance detection and a rewritten operator panel.

Photo — 16:9

MIP-0176 REV AOpen source

Print-farm watchdog

Thermal-runaway detection running on-device across a 24-printer farm.

Sidecar Rescue main window with a one-click Fix Connection action

Sidecar Rescue showing a healthy, connected Sidecar display

A native macOS utility that repairs a stuck iPad Sidecar display

Sidecar Rescue repairs the failure where an iPad refuses to reconnect as a Sidecar display — it stops appearing in Screen Mirroring and the usual remedy is a full reboot. Instead, it reads the iPad's live Sidecar process stack over USB or Wi-Fi and restarts only the stuck component, bringing the display back in seconds.

One button picks the correct repair automatically, a guided prompt walks the reconnection, and while a display is already live the destructive controls are hidden so a working session is never disturbed.

Requirements

macOS 14 or later (Apple Silicon). Developer Mode enabled on the iPad — a one-time setting. USB needs no extra software; reconnecting over Wi-Fi uses Apple's command-line device tools.

Built with

Swift and SwiftUI native app with a companion command-line interface over a shared engine. Device access sits behind a pluggable backend — Apple's CoreDevice (devicectl) plus an embedded, self-contained tool for a no-Xcode USB path, selected at runtime. CoreGraphics and IOKit display detection; on-device developer services for process control. Developer ID signed, notarized, hardened runtime. Bounded timeouts, single-instance locking, and a 75-case, fixture-driven automated test suite.

DOWNLOAD .DMG ↓

ONE_BOARD on the bench in a pogo-pin fixture, probes attached

The Raspberry Pi™ of medical devices

ONE_BOARD was developed for Boekel Scientific as a production solution for the painstakingly long development times experienced when new circuit boards were needed for projects.

It was designed and built with a partnered project builder — an AI-infused API that takes the core STM32CubeMX project and pin configuration and attaches a plain-text prompt system for outputting firmware, accessory-hat Gerber files and pick-and-place files — so even junior engineers can produce medical-grade I/O control boards for development projects.

The BOM and compliance documentation make ONE_BOARD suitable for ISO 13485 production in medical devices, an avenue where competitor products fall short.

For

Boekel Scientific. ONE_BOARD was developed with Boekel Scientific and with funding from a major customer (NDA), bringing a new level of haste to medical-grade equipment development.

Built with

Schematic and layout in KiCad; pin configuration in STM32CubeMX. Board-test prototypes and fixtures were machined in-house — toolpaths from NC Studio, run on the mill through G-Code Sentinel. Firmware and the prompt pipeline were written in VS Code with Claude. Final development boards were fabricated by PCBWay.

SolidOut with a handle lock converted to STEP — 23 planes, 15 cylinders, watertight, 0.000% volume delta

The desktop face of stl2step — my open-source engine that rebuilds a triangle mesh as a true CAD solid

I wrote both halves. stl2step is the engine — an open-source (MIT) C++ library and command-line tool that converts a triangle mesh into a parametric B-Rep solid, published on GitHub. SolidOut wraps it for anyone who wants the conversion without a terminal: open an STL, look at the mesh, convert, and export a STEP file that CAD and CAM kernels read as real boundary geometry.

Flat regions collapse from thousands of triangles into single planar faces; holes and bosses come back as right circular cylinders, rounds as fillets. Two modes: Verbatim keeps the tessellation byte-faithful, TrueForm recovers the analytic surfaces. The result panel reports what came back — plane, cylinder and fillet counts, the volume delta against the mesh and a watertight check — before you commit to an export.

Requirements

macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later on Apple silicon, or Windows 10/11 x64 — or run it in the browser at /solidout/ with nothing to install. The engine and OpenCASCADE ship inside the app; nothing runs in the background. Reads STL; writes STEP AP214 in millimetres.

Built with

Rust and Tauri 2 shell around a React and TypeScript interface, with a three.js viewport for the mesh and the converted solid. The converter is my own stl2step engine (C++17 on OpenCASCADE), bundled as a sidecar and launched per conversion; every run ends in a single machine-readable result line the app reads back. Developer ID signed, notarized, hardened runtime.

Downloads

MACOS ↓WINDOWS ↓

.msi alternate · checksums on the release page

STL2STEP ON GITHUB →TRY IT ON THE WEB →

Close project

index: 6 of 40 on file · full drawing packages and photography available under NDA · view all →

End of drawing sheetback to terminal ↓

04 — whoami_

about the builder

~/paradise — operator.jpg rec · 1152 × 864

Joshua Roberts on the water, machine-vision detection overlay

■ detections 3 model mip-vision min conf 0.941

uptime
26 YRS

shipped
40+

status
accepting

~/paradise — socials3 channels

instagram@maker_in_paradise x@makerinparadise facebookJoshua_Roberts

~/paradise — building with aiin production

AI is a tool on the bench, not a headline. I use it where it earns its place — catching defects a tired eye misses, drafting the boring half of a firmware module, keeping a print farm honest overnight — and I stay on the hook for whatever ships. The best frontier AI models and harnesses are the foundation of my workflow. I run my own orchestration systems designed around my workflow and documentation. Compliance and scope is built into every element of every project. A single context document follows the development of hardware, firmware, software and quality documentation.

agents in the loopplanning, audits, code review

vision on the benchdefect + presence detection

local inferenceon-device, no cloud round trip

tooling I shipopen-source agent utilities

~/paradise $ whoami

I am Joshua Roberts and I am a builder

01 · the short version

I have twenty-six years of taking hardware from a sketch on the back of a receipt to a pallet of finished units under my belt. Mechanical, electrical and firmware are all my responsibility, which means nothing gets lost in the handoff between three vendors who have never met and compliance is never lost in translation. Regulated medical and defense work is a normal Tuesday.

02 · how I got here

I started in the performance automotive industry, building parts for race cars and testing them on the track. I moved into the electronics side and started building hardware and writing firmware to support my ideas. When I wanted to start producing at scale, I was led down a path into manufacturing robotics and automation and never looked back. Today I am Chief Systems Engineer and Director of Engineering for Boekel Scientific in Philadelphia, PA. I live a unique lifestyle with roots in multiple US states and a house in Manila, PH and travel between locations regularly. I have taken electrical engineering and computer science courses at Harvard and MIT and AI courses through Nvidia. I am driven by my passion for creation and the restoration of the American manufacturing industry through automation.

03 · how I work

You brief me once and I handle the rest: CAD, boards, firmware, vendor calls, and the awkward questions nobody wants to put to a supplier. Every file, drawing and board package goes home with you unless clearly specified in the contract. No lock-in, nothing held hostage, and an honest no on the first call if it is not a fit.

basedSpace Coast, FL

alsoSan Diego · DC · Philadelphia · Manila

since1999

sectorsmedical · defense · lab · film · consumer

languagesC++ · JavaScript · Python · Swift · Rust · Typescript · HTML

05 — Revision history

the living resume

Same idea as a drawing's rev block — what changed, when, and why. Runs back to 2009 and I add to it as things happen.

Rev

Date

Description

Tag

2026-07-22

Watchdog v2 firmware shipped — thermal runaway detection on-device

FIRMWARE

2026-06-04

First articles off the line, sterile tray program — 300 units, zero rejects

MEDICAL

2026-04-18

Manila prototyping bench commissioned — overnight iteration loop

SHOP

2026-02-09

halus.ai out of stealth

VENTURE

2025-11-30

Boekel Scientific instrument line refresh — four SKUs re-tooled

LAB

$ git log --since=2009 ↓

06 — From the blog

The SolidOut window with a converted part on the canvas

2026-09-07 · TOOLS SolidOut now runs in the browser The desktop build of SolidOut has been around for a while: drop in an STL, get back a STEP file with real analytic faces instead of a bag of triangles. The part everyone asked about was the download… Read the post →

All poststhe build log

07 — Engagement models

MODEL A1 WEEK

Design review

I read your CAD, boards and BOM, then hand you the list nobody wants to write.

FIXED FEE

MODEL B6–12 WEEKS

Build sprint

Concept to working hardware in your hands. Mechanical, electrical and firmware together.

SCOPED PER PHASE

MODEL CONGOING

Fractional bench

A few days a month on call — vendors, drawings, escalations, and the awkward questions.

MONTHLY RETAINER

Request
for quote

Tell me what it has to do and when it has to exist. One business day to a reply — including an honest no. Whatever we make, the files come home with you.

josh@makerinparadise.com github.com/BlinkingSun ↗

NAME

—

SCOPE

MECHANICALELECTRICALFIRMWAREDFMSHORT-RUNHIRING

DESCRIPTION

what are we making?

NDA ON REQUEST · ITAR-AWARE

SUBMIT

Build like a master.

01 — Open source

02 — Capability matrix

03 — Project index

Sidecar Rescue

ONE_BOARD

SolidOut

Handheld spectrometer

Lab centrifuge controller

Print-farm watchdog

A native macOS utility that repairs a stuck iPad Sidecar display

The Raspberry Pi™ of medical devices

The desktop face of stl2step — my open-source engine that rebuilds a triangle mesh as a true CAD solid

04 — whoami_

I am Joshua Roberts and I am a builder

05 — Revision history

06 — From the blog

07 — Engagement models

Requestfor quote

Request
for quote