Damp in a rented house became an IoT platform. A dead 3D-printer screen became a firmware patch. A cold morning became a boiler that thinks for itself. Ten years of that — and some of it turned into products people pay for.
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Deep dive · July 2026
The platform worked and it was slow. Rather than rewrite, I measured — then went after the four worst offenders one at a time, with a Playwright and forced-GC harness to prove each fix. I also cut our CI bill by roughly 60% along the way.
A decade of it
I've never been able to stay in one lane, so I stopped apologising for it and made it the filing system. Five parts of the work — from the firmware on the sensor to the brochure it ships in. The counts are indicative, not an inventory — some projects sit in more than one. The archive is the part I've written up.
ESP32, MicroPython, sensors, BLE, gateways, Raspberry Pi, deep-sleep battery budgets.
15projects
Identity, packaging, brochures, product photography, 3D renders, motion and FX.
20projects
Laravel, multi-tenancy, RBAC, queues, WordPress, Shopify, Stripe, the boring parts done properly.
19projects
TimescaleDB, telemetry pipelines, Grafana, Three.js, SceneKit, backtesting engines.
9projects
MCP servers, agentic workflows, SageMaker inference, model promotion gates, scrapers.
13projects
Smaller things · lower bar · no apologies
OpenRGB and AlienFX both fail on this laptop, so I reverse-engineered the AlienFX API_V5 protocol over hidraw myself, from the device's own HID report descriptor. Native RGB control on Linux, with a CLI, wallpaper colour matching and a GNOME menu. Four releases, and the only working option I know of.
The Nothing Phone 3 has a small LED matrix on the back that Nothing lets you write toys for. Mine shows the Bitcoin price. Long-press to switch between the price and a Bitcoin glyph; a background service refreshes every five minutes. Phone 3 only, because it is the only one with the matrix.
I fitted an aftermarket LCD to my Prusa Mini and it flashed white every two seconds. The cause was a pin strap: the board leaves the controller in half-duplex mode, so the display's reply comes back on the wrong wire and the firmware reads garbage.
A video doorbell with two-way audio that never talks to anyone else's server. A Pi Zero 2 W, go2rtc bridging RTSP to WebRTC, MQTT into Home Assistant, and systemd units holding it up. The point was not saving the subscription. It was that the front door should not depend on a company staying solvent.
Live USGS seismic data on a textured 3D Earth — day, night, cloud alpha and normal maps. Swift 6 and SceneKit, deliberately pinned to Swift 5 language mode to keep the concurrency boundary sane.
A desktop pet for macOS that walks along the edges of your actual windows. It reads real window geometry, so it can sit on the top of whatever you happen to have open, fall off when you move it, and be picked up and thrown. An unconstrained NSPanel, some drag physics, and speech bubbles.
A prediction-market bot that trades weather. It pulls NOAA forecasts, prices them against Polymarket's order book, and looks for the gap. Weather isn't a quirky extra feature — it is the entire thesis.
An interactive visualiser for the 2D quantum harmonic oscillator — Hermite polynomials, degenerate states, the lot. You pick the quantum numbers and watch the wavefunction. Built because the textbook diagrams are static and the interesting thing about degeneracy is what happens when you move between states.
The chickens needed letting out in the morning and shutting in at night, and I did not want to be the mechanism. A Raspberry Pi, a motor and a scheduler handle it, and a Telegram bot handles me — open, close, status, or a photo of the coop.
The sense node that feeds apollo. An ESP32 running MicroPython with a BME280 driver I wrote by hand off the datasheet rather than pulling a library, posting to the house every cycle. If it fails to report fifteen times in a row it resets itself, on the theory that the most likely fix is the one nobody is there to do.
Large numbers of UK homes are in the wrong council tax band, set by a valuer driving past in 1991. This finds comparable properties on your street in lower bands, works out what the difference is worth, and drafts the challenge letter. The evidence-gathering is the hard part; the letter is the easy bit.
214 vintage Pokémon cards, modelled the way you would model a portfolio: real comparable sales rather than list prices, and a grade-versus-sell analysis for each card that asks whether paying for grading actually returns more than selling it raw. Mostly it does not.
Custom Favicon adds a settings page and a media-library picker for something WordPress made unreasonably awkward. Policy Checkboxes puts a compulsory privacy and returns tick-box on the WooCommerce checkout. Neither is clever. Both are released under GPLv2 and used by people I have never met.
A daily auto-organiser for a 41 GB shared file tree. Two properties made it worth building rather than scripting: it is idempotent, so running it twice does nothing the second time, and every move is written to a manifest so the whole run can be reversed. Anything it cannot confidently classify, it leaves alone.
A mixed-reality tool for learning the Platonic solids, built in Unity in 2018. Five shapes, five colours. The colours are the ones this site still uses to encode its five disciplines — I picked them for a student project eight years ago and never found a reason to change them.
This list grows whenever something in front of me breaks. If you have a better problem — or an idea you want built — tell me about it.
Get in touchBristol & Weymouth, UK
I'm Louis. I'm a full-stack engineer in Bristol, and I've been building things for about ten years — websites first, then platforms, then eventually the hardware underneath them.
Most of what I've made started as something annoying. Damp in a rented house that nobody would take seriously. A 3D printer with a screen that shipped broken. A boiler burning gas in an empty house. Chickens that needed letting out at dawn. I tend to reach for a soldering iron or an editor before I reach for a phone, and I've made peace with that.
A few of the annoyances turned into real products. Most just made my own life better — which was the point.
I build sensing platforms. ScentStudio teaches machines to recognise smells; AIRaware and LEAKaware are that same platform adapted for mould and for water leaks. I'm the platform developer on the team — the layer the products stand on, rather than the products themselves. Before that I was doing brand and product photography for hardware companies, which is a stranger career shape than it sounds.
I trained as a designer — BSc Digital Media, First Class, plus a Dean's Award — and ended up an engineer. Which means I care how a thing looks and feels as much as whether it works. That's really the whole pitch: I can take something from a render to firmware to a dashboard without handing it to anyone else.