This contains a list of personal projects I have undertaken for my own interest. It is still under construction, and is by no means comprehensive, but hopefully gives an idea of what I get up to! Work I have undertaken commercially, or as part of academic study, can be found in my Portfolio.
AlarmPi
After realising how most alarm clocks are incredibly stupid, irritating, and don’t deal very well with shift work in odd patterns, I set about making my own. Based on a Raspberry Pi, some hacked together hardware components and a Python program tying the lot together, the AlarmPi was born. More details, and a video of the (sort of) finished product are on the project page
TorrentLoad
A quick and simple set of Python/PHP and Greasemonkey scripts that allow the redirection of magnet: links on torrent sites to be redirected to an endpoint which turns them into files readable by rTorrent.
Robot Arm
I was given a Robot Arm a few years ago for Christmas, and subsequently discovered that you could get a USB module to be able to interact with it through software. Spurred on by my desire to learn some Python, I created a project to control the arm from an Xbox 360 controller, via a Raspberry Pi. Read all about the project, and see a video on the project page
TextCoin
TextCoin was born just before I started my job at OpenMarket, as I realised how the mobile payment space is a huge market within the UK at the moment. BitCoins are an anonymous digital currency, and at the time of TextCoin being released, there was not an easy and instantaneous way to trade the currency for GBP due to the threat of chargebacks (BitCoin transfers cannot be reverted, whereas bank transfers etc can). TextCoin introduced a simple way for people to buy BitCoins using their mobile phone, using a premium rate SMS service, with instant payout and relative anonymity (it is harder to trace a persons identity through a phone number than an email address) – two things that the BitCoin community craved. The service was extremely successful, selling out the initial batch of coins given to the server in a matter of hours, and has continued to thrive since.
Twit2MSN
Twit2MSN is a script written for the Messenge Plus! extension to Windows Live Messenger, which took the users twitter feed and integrated it into the status field of WLM. It received over 10,000 downloads during its time of active development, although sadly is no longer being worked on due to complications with the parent extension.
imapMover
During my time at university, I became extremely frustrated at the efforts made by the IT Service to block students from forwarding their email outside of the system automatically, as I wished to use a unified inbox in GMail rather than logging into separate systems. To retrieve and move my email with the headers being kept in-tact, I wrote a short PHP script to connect to one IMAP server and move unread messages to another, running as a cron job on a server. This script will be available here shortly
jMediaMixer
Written as a alternative to expensive video-mixing hardware, jMediaMixer used the Java Media Framework to take multiple types of external video feeds and provide a on-screen preview and mixing console. The project was developed on an extremely short time-frame (2 weeks), and despite numerous problems was used at a major event.
GCalCloud
GCalCloud was a short-lived PHP script to enable synchronisation of calendars from Google Calendar to external programs (such as the iPhone calendar application). A number of free commercial applications released this functionality soon after, so the project was scrapped
atcQFE
During my time with Bristol-ATC.com (now closed), I developed a number of VB.net applications to provide aviation-related information and calculations to members, including atcQFE.