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Lucas Licht Pradillo

I design where hardware and interface meet, so the seam between them disappears.

The problems I like are the ones that are hard to put into words and obvious the second they’re in your hand.

Industrial design is where I started, so I treat an interface like an object: it should have weight, edges, and a right way to be held. I’ve followed that instinct through an autonomous-vehicle cockpit at Mercedes-Benz, a tugboat’s controls, and the digital products I build now in Graz.

My projects usually start from an experience vision, a sense of how something should feel in someone’s day. The Disconnected Controller started with an evening after work: you want the comfort of a smart home, but every control lives on the phone you’re trying to put down. Sivun started with a meeting recorder that keeps everything private and still lets everyone in the room see when it’s listening.

Portrait of Lucas Licht Pradillo.

Industrial designer & design technologist · Graz, Austria

Getting from that vision to something people can hold often means building the tools first. My thesis at Mercedes-Benz turned into six more months in the Sindelfingen studio, and most of that went into a modular prototyping kit: components plug into an ESP32 and switch on from a web page the board serves itself, so an interaction idea can be wired up and tested the same afternoon someone has it.

A tool for the tool.

At Mercedes-Benz Design, I needed to try interaction ideas on real controls, and fast. So I built a kit: components plug into an ESP32 and switch on from a web page the board serves itself, and an idea can be wired up and tested the same afternoon.

Inputs
Motor fader · Rotary encoder · Linear encoder · Buttons · Potentiometers · Touch-sensitive surface
Outputs
Vibration motors · LED strips · Servo motor · Piezo buzzer
Bus
I²C plus a 5 V line over a 6-pin JST-SH daisy chain · PCF8574A expanders, ADS1115 converters and a PWM driver
Controller
ESP32, serving its own control page · two-way link to ProtoPie Connect

One interface for every part. The kit takes the parts you reach for when prototyping a control: motor faders, rotary and linear encoders, buttons, potentiometers and touch-sensitive surfaces on the input side. On the output side there are vibration motors, LED strips, a servo motor and a piezo buzzer.

Out of the box, none of them share an interface. Each wants its own pins and its own wiring. So I put every component on I²C, each through a chip that suits it: a digital expander for buttons and encoders, an analog converter for potentiometers and the fader, a PWM driver for the servo. The LED strips got a ready-made controller module on the same bus. They all share the same two wires, each answers to its own address, and the ESP32 talks to every one of them the same way. That shared interface is what made the kit modular. A new part gets an address and works next to the others.

Two small SOIC chips wired directly to a breadboard with loose jumper wires.
Before. These chips made the kit possible, but they’re tiny and miserable to wire by hand. I was testing three types at once. Only one came ready-mounted on a small breakout board with breadboard pins. The first of the others went in dead-bug style, with wires soldered straight onto their little legs. I broke a few that way. It got results, just slower than I wanted, so I took a step back: before trying out more expander boards, I needed a way to build every one of them the same way. That’s where the carriers came from.
Back side of three clear 3D-printed carrier boards with red, green and black wires routed through slots.
The carrier. A clear printed base holds the chip in a pocket and routes the wires through slots on the back: red for power, black for ground, green for the bus. Every module gets built the same way.
Three clear 3D-printed carrier boards, each holding a chip, labelled 0x38, 0x39 and 0x3A.
Addressed. Each carrier has its I²C address printed into it, 0x38, 0x39 and 0x3A, so you can tell them apart without a multimeter or a datasheet. The addresses also had to be planned. Most of these chips only offer a handful, four to eight, and no two parts on the bus can share one, so I picked them so the expanders, the analog converters and the PWM driver never overlapped.

Photography wasn’t permitted at the Mercedes-Benz Design Center. These are the only images of the kit’s development.

Click together. With the carriers, every module could be wired up and tested the same way, and that gave the kit a base to build on. The next question was how modules attach to each other. The bus itself only needs four wires: power, ground and the two I²C lines. I used small 6-pin JST-SH connectors and gave one of the spare pins a 5-volt line, because some components need more than the 3.3 volts the ESP32 runs on. Every module carries the same connector, so they daisy-chain: each one clicks into the one before it, or plugs straight into the base unit that holds the ESP32. The first set of components came out of that, among them a four-button pad with Cherry switches, all four wired to a single expander.

The control page. The ESP32 serves a small web app where you switch components on and off as you plug them in. Each component’s code lives in its own module, pulled in with one #include line, and the board only starts up the ones you’ve switched on. That way the ESP32 knows exactly which inputs and outputs it has, and it exchanges values with ProtoPie Connect in both directions, so the physical controls can drive a ProtoPie prototype and the prototype can drive the outputs in turn.

An I²C address is normally invisible: it lives in the code and in how three pins are tied. Printing it into the part makes it readable at a glance. It’s a small case of something I care about in every project: what a system is doing should be readable in the object itself.

What I am doing at the moment:

I moved to Graz in July 2025 to design production software at LearningSuite: the learning platform and its sister product, SalesSuite, a CRM. I take features from first concept through developer handoff, implementation review and QA. Most of the daily work is UI craft: hierarchy, states, and the quiet consistency of something people use every day, including dashboards that help customers understand and monitor their credit usage. I also led the team’s move to AI-assisted prototyping and built a design system around Claude Design for it. Complex workflows now get prototyped much faster, and the time that frees up goes into the small details and into directions we wouldn’t have had time to try before.

Most recently the LearningSuite founders asked me to design a new sales product from the ground up. It has two sides: an app for sales reps, and a cloud-based dashboard where managers follow their team and every rep can see their own progress. It isn’t out yet, so the details stay private for now.

Alongside the product work, I own both company websites end to end. I design every new page, brief graphic design on the visuals it needs, build it in Webflow and take sign-off from the owners directly. So far that’s four feature pages for SalesSuite, a set of unlisted pages for lead generation, and LearningSuite’s Intelligence page, the most developed of them.

On the bench:

Sivun

V2 in progress · since September 2026

A dictation and meeting-notes tool for the Mac that runs locally. Whisper transcribes the audio and a local LLM cleans up the transcript, so nothing ever goes to a server and you don’t have to wonder who else might be reading along. A small recorder feeds it: it records to a memory card and passes the files to the Mac over its own Wi-Fi network, so it never has to join a public network that can’t necessarily be trusted.

More and more devices record quietly in the background, and I wanted Sivun to do the opposite and leave the choice with the people in the room. You slide the cover open to record and closed to stop, so anyone at the table can tell at a glance whether it’s listening. The keyhole-shaped cutout lets the status light through for the quieter states, like being ready to sync, and it doubles as a reminder that the device has to be unlocked before any data can get in.

I started with V1 on an ESP32-S3, and it quickly got crowded: a separate SD card module, a boost converter and the charger all had to be wired in, which kept the shell bigger than I wanted. For V2 I moved to an ESP32-C6 board that has the card slot built in and runs straight off the battery, so the device could finally shrink. I chose the version with a screen on purpose. Sivun is meant for meetings that matter, and in those you want to see at a glance that the recording hasn’t been interrupted and how much longer you can keep going.

The first print of the V1 shell, its white base plate holding a USB-C charging board, a boost converter and a flat LiPo battery.
The open V1 shell on a wooden desk: an ESP32-S3 board, a round microphone and a LiPo battery wired inside a black 3D-printed case.
A hand lowering the ESP32 board into the V1 shell over the battery and power boards.
CAD section of the V1 shell from above: the ESP32-S3 board in the middle, flanked by two round microphones.
CAD visualization of Sivun V1: a larger rectangular grey box, its sliding cover pushed back to show a dark window.
V1First shell
The V2 electronics held in a hand: two round microphones above a small board whose screen reads “Mic test, IDLE” with battery and network status.
The V2 parts fresh off a textured print bed: the rounded-square body, the sliding cover with its keyhole slot, and the inner frame.
The V2 board held in a hand inside its printed frame, wires running across it and a microSD card in the slot.
CAD view into the V2 body: two microphones, the display board and the charging module packed into the rounded-square shell.
CAD visualization of Sivun V2: a smaller rounded-square body with a chrome sliding cover half open over a small screen.
V2Mic test, display running

Curious about this project?

V2, assembled · IR sensing the cover opening and closing

Datasheet

Rev. 2026

Unit

Designation
Industrial Designer & Design Technologist
Discipline
UX · Physical & digital UI · Interaction · Prototyping
Origin
German / Spanish
Deployed
Graz, Austria

Field record

2025–
LearningSuite Flexco, Graz: Product development, UX/UI
2025
Mercedes-Benz Design, Sindelfingen: Werkstudent, Advanced UX Design
2024–25
Mercedes-Benz Design, Sindelfingen: MSc thesis, in studio
2021–23
LLP Renderings: Self-taught 3D, freelance product renders & animation
2021
Smart-Ship B.V.: Azimuth control ergonomics

Certification

MSc ’25
Industrial Design: TU Eindhoven (Research, Design & Development)
BSc ’21
Industrial Design Engineering: The Hague University

Toolchain

Design
Figma · ProtoPie · Webflow · Adobe Creative Suite
3D / CAD
Fusion 360 · Blender
Code
Arduino (C++) · Python · Processing · ESP32 / I²C
AI / Build
Claude Code · Cursor · ComfyUI

Protocols

Languages
German C2 · English C2 · Spanish C2 · Dutch B2

Full record

Curriculum vitaePDF · 0.5 MB

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