About the lab
One bench, built in the open.
Jorik Rook is a small personal R&D lab: circuits, simulation and the tools that sit between them. This page explains the name, what is on the bench and the rules it runs by.
01 · Who
A working name for one engineer’s lab
Jorik Rook is the working name for one engineer’s personal lab. The engineer behind it likes circuits that behave, simulations that agree with the bench, systems drawn as boxes and arrows before anyone writes code, and dashboards that answer a question in one glance.
Most of what gets built here is built for its own maker first: a calculator that should have existed, a plot that explains a bug, a checklist turned into a tool. The things that hold up after a few weeks of real use get cleaned up and published. The rest stays on the bench, and that is fine.
02 · Why a rook
Straight lines, guarded corners
The rook is the plain piece on the board. It moves in straight lines, holds the corners, and when it is time to castle it steps in to protect the king. That is a fair description of good engineering work: direct, dependable, quietly defensive.
Under the rook sits a step-response curve: a system answering a sudden input. It overshoots a little, rings, and settles on the new value. Every project here works the same way. Take a step, watch what the system does, let it settle, then take the next one. One step further at a time.
03 · On the bench
Four tracks of work
Everything here starts as something the bench needed. These are the four tracks it is growing along; each one ships as its own tool when it is ready.
- Heaviside
SPICE simulator
Circuit simulation that runs in the browser: draw it, probe it, watch the transient and the Bode plot without installing anything.
Next up - Maxwell
CAD simulator
Mechanisms in motion: load a model, drive the axes, check reach, clearance and timing before anything is cut or printed.
Planned - Kirchhoff
PCA & PCB design
Schematics to boards: placement experiments, design-rule checks and review aids, with KiCad as the home format.
Exploring - Shannon
Software tools
Small, sharp utilities: calculators, parsers, converters and dashboards that turn a recurring chore into one click.
Ongoing
04 · How it’s built
Small stack, written down
- Own use first
Every tool starts as something needed on the bench this week. If it does not earn its keep there, it does not get published.
- Show the work
Plans, roadmaps and half-finished ideas are written down in the open. Dates are indicative; reasoning is included.
- Demo data is labeled
Anything that looks like a measurement but is not one says so, right next to the number.
- No tracking cookies
No ad trackers, no third-party fonts, no embeds that phone home. Fonts are self-hosted.
05 · Contact
Say hello
Questions, corrections, or a problem that sounds like it belongs on this bench: write to hello@jorikrook.com. Replies are slow but real.