Meet Louis Silverstein of Baraqu LLC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Louis Silverstein.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
The start of my story is the same as it was in 2019 when I did my last interview with VoyageLA, but there has been quite a lot of change in the last 7 years. (https://voyagela.com/interview/meet-louis-silverstein-dromebox-modcon-ip/).

When our story left off I was working with Aerial Tracking Systems to build a drone based tracking platform to help locate Pandas in collaboration with a Zoo in China. To close out that story we were successful. We were able to outfit a heavy lift drone with a Yagi antenna and build a telemetry package that could locate our panda targets (with RF transmitter collars) to within 3 meters of their actual location in under 40 min. This was a dramatic decrease in time needed to locate the animals as prior to our system it would take days to find the Pandas on foot via a hand held RF system. That was the start of a new chapter in my technology development and the real beginning of Baraqu LLC (an entity focused on technology development).

From there my story pivots to a full time solutions architect and engineer focusing on solving a range of problems from motion control camera systems to virtual reality reproductions of national parks. Something to revisit from my formative years, when I was young I always wanted to be an Inventor. I spent many hours building contraptions with legos, kinex, and erector sets. I also loved a computer game called Incredible Machines. My goal was to invent things to help people, but as I got older and made my way through school I was diagnosed with Dyslexia and told that the sciences were most likely not something that would be a viable career, as my spelling ruled out Computer Science (a skill that depends on very precise language) and for some reason my teachers assumed the best course of action for me was to focus on the arts. So for many years (as is evidenced in my prior interview) I focused my energies in the arts, but in my late 20s started to shift towards technology development.

In 2019 I took the plunge head first into tech development helping build a rocket blast proof camera case for an IMAX film and then working on the aforementioned Panda Drone. Following that I was contracted to build a VR simulator for helping heart surgeons by emulating problem scenarios that could happen in the OR so when it happened in real life they were ready without having to experience the rapidly changing environment in reality for the first time. I also was part of deploying a VR King Tut experience in London at the Saatchi Gallery and was the On Site expert in charge of managing the Motion Chairs in which the experience was being delivered.

When COVID hit I had just started working on a camera solution with MSG to help them film content for the Sphere in Vegas. I was the engineer in charge of building a scratch track recorder and Take Orchestrator for a camera control rig to allow for automated previews of shots being recorded for the ultra high resolution sphere format. This was a hardware and software solution as the unit had to talk to oldschool motion control systems via RS232, modern Touch Designer preview systems, as well as Red cinema cameras and a witness cam. Following this project I was able to work on some VR related projects during the lock down for a music label that wanted a VR VOD player that felt like a living room experience with a BIG screen tv that transported the user into 360 videos. Additionally at that time I worked on some hardware solutions for a friend who worked as an ER doctor during the pandemic.

For my doctor friend I developed a prototype system we called PPE-COM, it was a self contained bluetooth microphone that could fit inside their PPE (without wires thus preserving the protective seal) paired with a wireless battery operated speaker they could attach to their scrubs allowing them to communicate through their thick PPE without having to strain their voice all day and allowing them to more easily communicate with patients with hearing issues. This project was short lived as the vaccine was rolled out as we were starting to field test the units and PPE requirements rolled back to standard masks and nullified our use case. But this was my first real go at PCB design.

During the pandemic I was also contracted to build Yosemite National park in VR for an immersive motion simulator experience. This project entailed utilizing USGS data, hand collected data, and other academic resources to produce a VR model of the part with as close to scientific accuracy as possible. Utilizing USGS scans and flora information I was able to build a program that populated the VR scene with accurate foliage using real density and population information. Using photogrammetry, DEM / Lidar scans, and a bit of artistry we were able to capture El Cap, Half Dome, and a handful of other Yosemite landmarks and produce an 18 minute long award nominated experience narrated by Bryan Cranston.

Following this project I was hired to remaster the King Tut experience I was helping with prior to the pandemic so it could be deployed without the motion chairs. This required optimizing the project for mobile headsets using all of the tools and tricks I had learned in my VFX days. It was at this point that I started to really get into hardware development and learn embedded systems. Another friend who is an ER doctor approached me with a problem he had in his practice and together we developed a tool to help administer injections with limited available hands to help (this project is still being tested so I can’t expand too much as we are not patent protected yet). But this was my first real dive into hardware. Following that hardware project I undertook a handful of personal projects ranging from a Thermal Camera based rear view mirror system for driving at night (the thermal camera eliminates all headlights and allows the driver to see any vehicle behind them regardless of illumination), automated window and door IOT devices, an XR application for converting 2d Ultrasound systems into a 3d Ultrasound system, an IOT device for “long distance relationships”, and misc other projects.

Along the way I also developed an android application for a client to allow them to log telemetry using a phone but time synced to real time code using the audio port as a LTC lock. This allowed their drone company to log metadata from their system and fuse it with the GPS, IMU, and LTC via the application running on any android phone with an audio jack. At this point in my story I had developed a reputation via word of mouth that if you need something figured out “call Louis.”

I spent some time working as a consultant doing everything from medical systems (software) consulting to developing a range of VR related content protection and licensing tools (XRMGR.com), to fitness application development (a current client project)

This brings us to the present day and the thing that seems to be the current culmination of my skills. In 2024 my parents lost their house to the Franklin fire and I watched in horror alongside the rest of Los Angeles as the Palisades Fire ravaged the city. Not long after I was contacted by a family friend who wanted to know if I could build a solution to allow them to remote control their property focused fire suppression system. They wanted to be able to control the system regardless of the status of their home network connection or cellular connection falling back to a satellite for a worst case scenario. This was the birth of FIREWALLio (https://FIREWALLio.com), a controller that allows any home owner to connect pumps, valves, etc to a unit that can be operated via wifi, cell, or satellite, depending on what infrastructure is available during the emergency. The system is agnostic and can work with any hardware someone wants to use to defend their home from the ever increasing risk of wild fires and is the culmination of my years of experience in hardware and software engineering. My hope is to get this product into the mass market so people can deploy their home defenses from a safe location. One of the issues with existing systems is they depend on infrastructure like ISP connected internet or cellular failovers (4g, LTE, or “emergency satellite”) to control their systems and during a fire emergency these are the first systems to go offline. When someone is evacuated they then have zero way to engage the costly protections they might already have installed on their property. That is where my solution shines. We leverage industrial grade satellite failover so even when traditional infrastructure fails we can talk to satellites designed to stand up during an emergency. I have spent the first half of my career designing systems and projects to help tell stories, but it is at this point that I want to help people control their own narrative and protect their homes from the threat of wild fire.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
A smooth road, not in the least, but if it was a smooth road what would I have learned? As mentioned in my backstory, I was diagnosed with dyslexia early on in life and was told a STEM career was not within reach. Thanks to technology, at the age of 24 I was eventually able to overcome my dyslexia thanks to a program I learned about in the book The Brain That Changes Itself. It noted a university that was developing a technology to help with neuroplasticity and rewire the brain of people with dyslexia. The fruits of their research became Gemm Learning and a program called Fast ForWord. After using their application for 6 months (every day for an hour) the symptoms of dyslexia I had struggled with my entire life had been lifted. Life is also not a linear path, like many people COVID was very disruptive to the journey, but it provided an invaluable opportunity to build the relationship with my family. We all sheltered together and had the opportunity to live together as adults and that was such an amazing experience. After COVID my family house suffered a fire in the Franklin fires in Malibu and that helped shape my interest in using my skills to help defend homes against fire threat.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Baraqu LLC is the culmination of my life’s work thus far. Baraqu translates to Bolt of Lightning from ancient sumerian and to me symbolizes the power to change things. Since starting Baraqu I have focused my energy on developing tools and projects that aim to help solve problems or educate. I also am no longer a single person shop, I have learned the power of collaboration and Baraqu will hire experts for different tasks when needed, and I keep a contact list of people I can work things out with at the ready. Our specialty is problem solving. We have done work in computer science, academic research, medical engineering, embedded systems design and fabrication, app development, virtual reality, technology auditing, etc. We believe that everything is systems at their lowest level and when you break them down to their smallest components, everything becomes very accessible. If experience in a domain is a question for a project we make sure to employ an expert in that field and use the opportunity to learn as much as we can about that process to further our knowledge for future projects. To this point all of our work has been Word-of-mouth. For the last 10 years I have yet to seek out a project “knock on wood.” We have had a steady stream of projects to keep us busy, but always have bandwidth to onboard more! One of the projects in which we are most proud is our VR reconstruction of Yosemite National Park. It took over a year to faithfully reconstruct the park in VR for an 18 minute long experience that allows a viewer to get the cliffsnotes tour of the park in full VR. This project was done for City Lights, an LA based entertainment company that has a handful of amazing VR/XR projects on their roster. But the project in which I am most excited is our new FIREWALLio venture. Using everything we have learned in the last 20+ years of professional experience the present opus of our knowledge has landed in a system designed to help protect properties from the ever present threat of wildfire. FIREWALLio is a system designed to allow the user to deploy countermeasures from the safety of an evacuation point far from the fire zone. Our system utilizes industrial satellite technology as well as other backbone infrastructure to maintain communication between a user and their property when a fire is imminent. We also monitor system integrity like pressure, flow, temperature, to provide the user with feedback about the systems performance. We are presently developing our own suite of sensors and onsite intelligence to allow our system to actively inform and deploy when a user is otherwise unreachable.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
As a native Delawarian, Los Angeles is quite a shock at first. I grew up in the “Village” of Hockessin and to give a mathematical comparison, Sherman Oaks (the area in which I currently live) has a population that is over 500% larger than the entire town in which I am from, and Hockessin is also close to 1sq/mi larger than Sherman Oaks. I love the city and have called it home for over 15 years.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://baraqu.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/baraqu-llc
• Other: https://firewallio.com