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Weird Wearable Tech and Fields of Dreams
Bailey Steinfadt is a longtime Des Moines-based engineer, and has been with Dojo Five since May of 2019 as an embedded developer. She is also the technical product manager for the EmbedOps product.
Bailey is a Maker, and is actively involved as a board member and instructor for Area515 Maker Space in Des Moines. Needless to say, she likes “messing with electronics stuff” as well as teaching others how to mess with electronics stuff.
Bailey knew since she could talk that she would be an engineer, studied electronics independently in high school and designed a sound-reactive robot for fun. She graduated with a BS in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University. Through her studies and personal projects, Bailey realized she liked developing things in the world instead of pixels on a screen.
Early in her career, she was deep into AgTech at DuPont Pioneer, developing IoT and robotics systems for everything from automating combines to detecting fluorescence in seeds. She has written code for vision systems and image processing, lab management systems, field (the corn kind) data sensors, and data collection systems. In the firmware world, she has most recently been working on a variety of BLE applications but has also worked on mobile robots, wearable tech for safety applications (and for fun), and DMX lighting systems.
Bailey’s ideal job would involve getting paid to be creative and develop ideas into real things. Her zen place is when she can make real world art that isn’t constrained by a requirement for commercial viability. She recently developed some unique custom PCB’s in KiCad to teach soldering to kids at the Area515 Maker Space. Her current dream is a barn quilt embedded with LEDs.
She considers herself “a surfer on the waves of what’s required” when it comes to her preferred programming languages and hardware platforms. She likes to find the environment that is right for the application, and has written things for PLC’s and FPGA’s all the way through iOS apps.
"My biggest hobby is collecting hobbies. I still want to be everything.”
Working with such a wide range of applications and teams, Bailey has come to value an environment where lifelong learning, excellent communication, and process improvement are seen as foundational, and she’s found Dojo Five to be one of the best places to live those values. The dedication and motivation of her co-workers makes work fun.
In her free time, she’s often found doing DIY renovations, crocheting presents for friends and family, building weird projects, and wrangling her nosy rescue greyhound.
