Binh Pham

this is my portfolio, as an infinite canvas

you can zoom in and out, move around as much as you like

you can click on stuff, some stuff can lead you to links and other stuff

try, the world awaits you

i like to call myself a robot whisperer, because more than being a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer or software engineer, i design experiences surrounding robots.

sometimes that means training world models and policies myself, sometimes that means collecting hundreds of episodes just to prove a point, sometimes that means designing an entire new robot from scratch. it really doesn’t matter, they are just means to an end.

i believe in a future where robots co-live with humans. it’s been on the back of our minds for centuries e.g. the duck automaton in 1764 by jacques vaucanson. but our generation is the generation where robotics could truly be solved: the intersection of interaction, intelligence and infrastructure.

besides the personal connection, robots are the solution to a lot of humanity’s problems. in the 21st century, we’ll start to see a declining birth rate, which will put more pressure on our food supply, manufacturing, logistics, and pull us into deeper conflict over what's left.

general robots stand as a solution for us to scale our civilization to the next level without conflict. they are the work force we need for our survival on our home planet and for our expansion into the stars.

this is my mission, as much as it is our generation’s.

hardware projects

these are the projects that i built with hardware, mostly on esp32. some has been featured on hackaday, hackster and countless other sites.

fullstack projects

back when llms weren't a thing, i did a lot of fullstack projects that involve stuff from backend to frontend to infra to iot provisioning

terminal projects

they are mainly my uni projects, back in 2022, i implemented neural net from scratch in c++, that got me like a top of class honor in oop, again without llm, cause llm didn't code back then

fact: my fav prog lang is c, second is rust

creative coding projects

i used to do some creative coding projects, they are actually featured on domestika, where i first learned how to do creative coding at all, was pretty proud of that

illustration projects

i love illustrating stuff when i was a kid, my parents are really proud of my drawing skills, they would show my drawings everywhere

some got displayed in exhibitions

photography projects

I love photography. I do a mix of both digital and film. I now only keep my film camera which is an Olympus OM-1. It breaks a lot, but it is a mechanical design masterpiece when it comes to how the shutter works.

*try playing with my dogs to test the nodes

here are some bones

*tip 1: you should try to slide to the left first - - - >

*tip 2: it's a ritual to give my doggos some bones

*fun fact: i was featured on awwward for this site in 2024

my constellation of random projects

and some fun facts about me

for those who don't know me

about me + pictures of robots i've worked with or designed from scratch

me and my friend, arnie, never worked with humanoids before.

i only had a bit of experience with an unitree h1 back when i did contract work in the uk.

in a nice evening in paris in 2025, i texted arnie and said hey let's find an unitree g1 and do full body control on it.

at this time, full body control was very hard, i'm not sure if at the point of reading this it is easy or not, but it was hard then. normally, we have to separate locomotion and bimanual manipulation on a humanoid. there were no readily available way to do it.

as the plot went, in just a week, i went to zurich to reunite with arnie, we found an unitree g1 (gg arnie), and was the first team in the world to reproduce the data pipeline for a then frontier research paper on full body control.

giga chads.

i was on schedule to visit sf on the 18th of may 2026 for the robotics team offsite at livekit

right after booking my flights, i saw south park commons (where i used to be a fellow) posted their hackathon on robotics, it was on the weekend of the 16th

i pinged david, my manager, said "hey do you want to do this, i'll cancel my flight", he said he needed to ask his boss (his daughter)

10 min later, i canceled my flight, and pushed it earlier just for the hackathon

we ended up winning the hackathon, gg david and jacob

being the person with no filter, if i think something's right, i don't hold back

this is me on a stream from nvidia on nvidia cosmos, their opensource multimodal llm

saying the llm doesn't matter on being asked what is the key to making a good harness

in a hackathon on using nvidia's models

anyway, this is another hackathon i won at livekit, i did the entire project in the weekend when i first joined the company, then we went ahead and won 3rd place

one of my proudest achievement ever is being the only person to win werewolves as the sole survivor at fr8

in case you don't know what the sole survivor role is, the role doesn't belong in the villagers nor the werewolves

you can only win if you're the last one standing, with a single villager left (despite the role being called sole survivor, if you sole survive with a werewolf then it can just kill you so you can't win in this case)

so what i did to win was basically tricking the werewolves and the villagers to kill each other until there are only one villager, one werewolves and me

then i convinced the villager to vote to kill the last standing werewolf

then i won

i basically got the fuckest made up role in the game, a role with the shittiest rule and no powers (we call it the joker at fr8) and still won

*as you may have guessed, this role required insane luck too, cause i need to not get killed by the werewolves every turn, i think the condition leading to winning this game was everyone thought i sucked at it so they mercy not kill me

*i was cohort 1.0 at fr8, but i think this record will hold for a long long time

i successfully stream sniped ishowspeed in finland once.

one's life is a story with multiple acts, these are some of my dad lores

my kids gonna be proud kids

me on a hammock on the coast of a random island in the baltic sea

till this day i still don't know where the f i was

this is me and my fav shirt at yosemite

when i left human computer lab in 2025, to get jobs, i made a video called an open letter to learning

from that video on

nik, the founder of omi, invited me to his warehouse in sf, where i successfully hacked the friend pendant, went viral and got an offer for 5M$ in equity, to which i declined

on a random day in april 2025, at a hackathon (which i later won), i called my then cofounder to ask him whether he wanted to go to finland with me for 3 months to build a startup

unbeknownst to me at the time, he was about to ask his girlfriend to marry him the next month, yet he said yes

we then built human computer lab, a startup on human computer interaction for 3 months in finland

at the end, we raised 500k$ from south park commons and fr8

this is the video of the moments we signed the safes

although i left human computer lab later on, the 3 months is still one of the best and most transformative period of my entire life

that hackathon where i asked my co-founder then to join me in finland btw

it's also a very random story on how i even ended up at this hackathon

long story short, a friend in munich asked me if i want to go, i said if he let me crash at his place i'll book a flight from budapest to munich just to join him

we ended up winning the thing, the thing is the biggest university hackathon in germany btw (TUMMakeathon)

it's also one of the first times i realize i can compete with the best of the best on the hardest possible problems (TUM researchers on drone navigation) and pedigree at big universities means shit

david lakatos, the cpo of formlabs, shot me an 3 words email after seeing the video, asking whether i want to work in boston or budapest, to which i also declined

and several other startups

working on stuff other than robots didn’t interest me

david chen, my manager at livekit now, pulled up to my house in sf with livekit merch and said he’ll create a role just for me to join the company, i can work on whatever i find interesting with robots

that’s how i joined livekit

my short history

i'm 22 (May 1st 2004 so I enjoy working by fate, iykyk)

i co-founded a startup called human computer lab, but i have since left the company to chase my own explorations. we raised 500k usd from fr8 and south park commons in our pre-seed, built a few products, most notably lelamp.

i previously worked at a hungarian startup called mindrove on brain-computer interface. we have served large institutions in the world including mit media lab and harvard innovation lab.

i previously worked at ericsson as an innovation engineer and for intel as a guest developer for their intel cofluent + intel ipu. during the same time, i also have offers to work at arm to maintain android for their IP but i declined.

i was also a interaction design contractor, i used to do contracts for unitree and a few well known startups in silicon valley (nda, i can't mention their name).

i used to launch products on product hunt, to which i've been featured 3 times. i also was a part of multiple hacker houses and fellowships around the world, from fr8, to the residency, to localhost, to bevisionaries mercedes benz and south park commons.

i'm proficient in a range of technology from infra (youngest in vietnam to get aws certified - dev assoc at 18) to networking (ccna-level and 4g/5g networks) to digital ic design (verilog, vhdl) and web.

what i do on nights and weekends

i write blogs on https://garden.binhph.am and have a decent youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@build_with_binh. through these, i have partnered with large brands in china (seeedstudio, nextpcb, dfrobot, etc) and became a serious part-time content creator. my work has been featured on hackaday, xdadeveloper, hackster.io, tom's hardware, etc.

my personal blog is here

i often write technical articles on it, as well as personal articles

i call them flowers and bolts

flowers are random thoughts and stories, while bolts are technical writeups

the blog is called garden, which is a simple way of saying this is where i nurture my thoughts

the viz on the blog itself has a special meaning, it's inspired by oxman's kreb cycle of creativity, which says scientific achievements often are inspired by art, and in turn art is inspired by science

the viz is a special conway's game of life on a xy coordinate system, each dot represents an idea, which takes shape as a flower then turn to a bolt

upon withering, a bolt gives life to many other dots in its proximity, which then creates a zone of development and innovation

much is like how innovation in real life takes place, often times a zone dominates, but only for a while, before stochasticity takes place and another dominant force arrives.