Who is Thomas?

Thomas the Maker

Hi! I'm Thomas the Maker, an Engineer who loves to tinker and build.

Background

I'm a Mechanical/Robotics Engineer turned Software & ML, based in Melbourne, Florida.

Over my career, I've worked as a Mechanical Engineer, Robotics Engineer, Plumbing Engineer, Software & AI Engineer. The consistent thread is a love for building things — from physical robots to tiny language models.

What I Do

This is a collection of tools, robots & applications I built. The goal of these tools is to allow people to build things with a sense of optimism.

Projects

  • Starmind — Building tiny, intelligent language models that kids can run on a $15 Raspberry Pi. Funded by Inflection Grant & Prime Intellect.
  • Bentobot — A robot fight tournament you can play from your bed. 100+ players. Featured on Raspberry Pi Magazine.
  • OG ComfySpace — A universal remote control for hobbyist robots. 1.5 years in the making.

Experiments

  • CADMonkey — Fine-tuned Gemma3 to generate 3D objects from text. 380+ models created in 12 hours on Reddit.
  • Starmind Pico — Trained a language model to run on the RP2040 microcontroller. 176 architectures tested for $20.
  • TinyGSM — Multi-teacher synthetic data for math-capable small models.

Company

I also co-founded BillulloNex with my best friend Javier — a startup building AI software & hardware for enterprise. We're profitable, growing organically, and building great tech.

Philosophy

"You really can just do things. You just have to be crazy enough to start."

I believe that 5 years ago, the experiments I run today would have cost 5 figures and a team of 20 scientists. Now you can do them over a few weekends with some GPU credits and determination.

Connect

Get Lab Notes

Experiments, builds & behind-the-scenes from the workshop. No spam.

Up next

The ComfySpace Philosophy

Building tools for tinkerers — the goal is to allow people to build things with a sense of optimism.