The archive
24 entries
The homepage shows the work that earns a long read. This is all of it — the case studies newest first, then the lab.
Projects
2026apolloAI & AgentsA house on a Raspberry Pi2024AIRaware & LEAKawarePlatforms & APIsOne platform, two products2023ScentStudioHardware & FirmwareTeaching machines to smell2022Identity & printBrand & PrintAn ongoing freelance practice2021NebraHardware & FirmwareTwo years leading digital2020CladworksBrand & PrintScreen and street2020Northern Rail & healthcarePlatforms & APIsEnterprise platforms at Netriver2016Pi SupplyBrand & PrintFour years of Raspberry Pi2015Kickstarter campaignsBrand & PrintGetting hardware funded
Lab
2026alienware-m15-rgbHardware & FirmwareOpenRGB 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.2025Bitcoin on the Glyph MatrixHardware & FirmwareThe 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.2026Prusa Mini screen fixHardware & FirmwareI 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.2026A doorbell with no cloud in itHardware & FirmwareA 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.2026Earthquake Mission ControlData & VisualisationLive 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.2026ClaudePetPlatforms & APIsA 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.2026TraderBotAI & AgentsA 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.2025Visualised functionData & VisualisationAn 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.2023Chicken door controllerHardware & FirmwareThe 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.2026esp32-senseHardware & FirmwareThe 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.2025Council tax band challengerData & VisualisationLarge 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.2026A card collection as an asset classData & Visualisation214 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.2023Two WordPress pluginsPlatforms & APIsCustom 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.2026An undoable file organiserPlatforms & APIsA 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.2018platonic-realityData & VisualisationA 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.