Aside from work related coding and design, I also spend quality time coding and engineering for other things, mainly robots and home automation. You can see some of the things I've been working on here:
The OctoCam TwitterBot is meant to be a fun and useless robot. It started as a Pimoroni kit, and quickly grew more tentacles. Watching the fish is oddly relaxing and keeping an eye on the tank from afar is convenient, but I'm also fascinating by the contemplation of all of our lives-in-data. In a culture flooded with information, I wanted to think about the concept of broadcasting an unending stream of non-repeating strings of information, as all of us increasingly do with every movement. To deem this a "useless robot" would be to acknowledge that conceptually many of our own daily action may also be in the same boat.
Springing from the OctoCam came larger home and habitat automation. Using a mixture of Home Assistant and ReefPi, both open source systems for controlling human and fish habitats, respectively I made it my goal to recreate an Amazon freshwater biotope and a Bali Reef biotope as closely as possible, integrating publicly available weather, tide, and light data available, with local sensors and basic equipment.
A natural byproduct of fishkeeping is nitrogen rich wastewater, and I wanted a way to use some of it for an indoor herb garden. With the help of a 3d printer and some python code, I installed an aquarium-side vertical garden and integrated it into my home automation system.
Collection of (mostly) python scripts that aid in home automation or fishkeeping.