Dan Chase

I've spent nearly twenty years in the gap between technology and the people who depend on it. I started out keeping radio stations on the air, spent seven years supporting schools and town offices in Franklin, taught high school technology and engineering, and most recently worked the help desk for the Commonwealth's procurement system.

The systems changed every time. The job didn't: figure out what the person in front of me is trying to get done, then make the technology get out of their way.

I'm looking for my next role. Located on Cape Ann; open to Greater Boston, the North Shore, southern NH and remote.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts · 2021–2026

The help desk for Massachusetts buyers

At the Operational Services Division I supported COMMBUYS, the state's procurement system, and VRM, its vendor sales reporting system. State buyers, city and town officials, and vendors called with everything from first-time bid postings to tangled account permissions, and I took both the first-line and the escalated tickets.

A lot of the job was teaching: walking procurement officials and municipal staff through the system one-on-one until posting a bid felt routine. Behind the scenes I built a Microsoft Power Automate pipeline that put the help desk's numbers into a daily report for leadership, so nobody had to compile it by hand.

Franklin High School · 2017–2020

FRED: school TV built from Raspberry Pis

The old ceiling-hung TVs that carried morning announcements were coming down, but most classrooms already had a projector and a network connection. So I designed FRED, Franklin's Raspberry Pi Educational Delivery system ("Yabba Dabba Do It Yourself"). When the studio goes live, a control server tells a Raspberry Pi in each room to switch the projector on over a serial cable I soldered myself, change inputs, and play the stream. No teacher has to touch anything, and nothing leaves the building.

I designed and piloted it and presented it at the MassCUE Fall Conference at Gillette Stadium in 2019 and 2020, but COVID closed the schools before it could roll out. I also led MassCUE's Technology Integration Specialist SIG, a statewide group for the people whose job is teaching teachers to use technology.

Old Sloop Church, Rockport · 2021–now

Live every Sunday, no retakes

I'm the streaming video director at the Old Sloop, Rockport's First Congregational Church. I run the cameras and the live stream for services and events, and I maintain and upgrade the gear. There's no second take on a Sunday morning, so the system has to work the first time.

I also installed the camera behind the photo at the top of this page: a dual-camera unit in the bell tower, feeding a server I set up and wrote the control software for. It streams the view to YouTube around the clock with live weather and tide data, sends my phone an alert if anything breaks, and saves a still every couple of minutes. That's where the photo came from.

Things I've taken apart (and put back together better)

What I do for fun is mostly the same job without the ticket queue: something stops doing what someone needs, and I find a way to make it work.

Home network on OPNsenseA small office PC turned into a real firewall.

My home router is OPNsense running on a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny. It has a single network port, so the internet connection and the home network reach it as separate VLANs through a managed switch. Next up: a cellular backup that takes over automatically when the cable modem drops.

A phone system in the cloudTwo phone lines, real desk phones, my own PBX.

Our home phone lines run through an Asterisk PBX I built on a Google Cloud VM, with SIP trunks from VoIP.ms. Polycom desk phones register to it, and I checked live calls to confirm they really use HD (G.722) voice instead of quietly falling back to narrowband.

Church Wi-FiEnterprise access points, no cloud controller.

Aerohive enterprise access points running standalone at the church, with cloud management turned off: one network name on both bands, and channels planned by hand so the access points don't talk over each other. Two are up so far; the other two are waiting their turn.

Cameras freed from the cloudNo app, no account, still works.

Three Wyze cameras reflashed with the open-source thingino firmware. They now stream over standard RTSP and ONVIF on my own network, the pan cameras still pan, and nothing phones home.

The speaker Bose abandonedThe cloud went dark in May. Mine still plays.

Bose shut down the SoundTouch servers on May 6, 2026, which broke the preset buttons and the app. The speaker's own local interfaces survived, so I documented them and still run it over my network.

LED sign in Home AssistantAn old scrolling sign now shows the weather.

A Pro-Lite moving-message sign from the serial-port era, now driven by Home Assistant over MQTT through a small bridge container I wrote. It shows the outdoor weather, refreshed every minute, and the bridge has 87 tests that run against a simulator, so I can change the code without touching the hardware.

A 1948 Singer, rewiredArduino brains for a 78-year-old sewing machine.

A Singer 66 from 1948 is getting an electronic foot control: the original pedal's contacts feed an Arduino Nano that drives the motor through a MOSFET power stage. That stage sits on 120-volt mains, so I simulated it in SPICE first.

Weather radio relayTeaching an alarm clock to hear a different weather station.

The outdoor weather station transmits at 433 MHz; the La Crosse alarm clock only listens for its own sensors at 915 MHz. A Raspberry Pi Pico with a CC1101 radio hears each outdoor reading and re-sends it in the clock's format, in a burst of about 15 milliseconds.

Sermon podcast pipelineSunday's sermon, in your podcast app.

Every Sunday service is recorded anyway, so I built a pipeline that turns the recordings into a podcast, with the weekly sermons and a back catalogue from the church's former pastor in one feed.