Learning by building

From-Scratch Builds

A collection of original projects I build from the ground up to learn the tools behind them — robotics, high-performance computing, the web, distributed systems, blockchain and more. Each one showcases what I made and what it taught me.

All original work: every project here is built by me from scratch — my own code, my own writing, my own design. No templates, no forks.

56 builds
7 domains
ongoing

Robotics & Control

15 builds
BUILD 01

Robot-Arm Digital Twin

A live virtual replica of a robot arm on ROS + CoppeliaSim + Docker, deployable across Edge, Fog and Cloud.

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BUILD 02

Digital Twin Scalability

Scaling robot instances over time, then a Random Forest that predicts SLA breaches for autoscaling.

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BUILD 03

Networked Mobile-Robot Service

A wheeled mobile robot exposed as a network service — navigation, LiDAR localisation and control as relocatable containers.

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BUILD 04

Robot Manipulator Datasets

CSV datasets captured from a six-axis arm and its digital twin, including a labelled set for supervised training.

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BUILD 05

Quadruped Robot Dog

An open-source <€500 robot dog — ROS2, inverse kinematics, servo firmware, CAD and MkDocs.

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BUILD 06

Interactive Projector-Lamp Robot

A six-axis arm carrying a mini projector that detects pointing gestures and projects answers onto the desk.

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BUILD 07

Servo-Driven Power Switch

A Raspberry Pi that drives a servo to physically press a device's power button at boot via GPIO and systemd.

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BUILD 08

Modular Robot-Arm Stand & Base

A 3D-printed base and modular rest-position trees that house the electronics and stabilise a six-axis arm.

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BUILD 09

Robot-Arm Operator's Handbook

An eleven-lesson handbook taking a beginner from installing a six-axis arm to driving two arms at once.

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BUILD 10

Motion-Capture to ROS Bridge

A ROS package that streams optical motion-capture data into ROS topics and re-exposes it over UDP.

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BUILD 11

Motion-Capture Data Publisher

A minimal VRPN-based guide and launch file that publishes optical tracking data into a ROS core.

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BUILD 12

Tangible Tabletop Tracking

Tracks physical objects on a table with motion capture and projects live graphics back onto the surface.

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BUILD 13

Marker Tracking Lab

A vision pipeline that detects fiducial markers, recovers 3D pose, and aligns camera and motion-capture frames.

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BUILD 14

Wearable Swarm Control

Sensor gloves and a haptic vest that let one person command a multi-robot swarm by gesture over ROS 2.

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BUILD 15

Plant-Tending Light-Path Robot

Wireless soil/light sensors plus a depth camera and a light-path planner guide a plant toward the light.

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Interactive Installations

6 builds

High-Performance Computing

4 builds

Bots, Agents & Services

6 builds

Web & Sites

10 builds
BUILD 32

AI Policy Microservice Stack

A modular microservice stack for AI-enhanced policy making: ingestion, simulation, analytics, dashboards.

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BUILD 33

Academic Portfolio Template

A content-first academic personal site where publications, talks and a CV are written in Markdown.

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BUILD 34

Research Paper Landing Page

A clean, fast academic project page authored in Markdown with LaTeX/figure/video components.

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BUILD 35

Academic Personal Website

A content-managed Django + htmx personal site where publications and talks are edited from an admin.

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BUILD 36

Research Group Website

A Django site presenting a research group's lines, projects, people and publications as one connected world.

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BUILD 37

Lab Website Frontend

A Next.js + TypeScript frontend that renders content from a separate headless CMS over a REST API.

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BUILD 38

Lab Website Backend

A headless CMS content engine that stores schema-defined content and serves it as JSON over a REST API.

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BUILD 39

Personal Website Template

A reusable Django starter to stand up your own academic personal site — a generic template, not a one-off.

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BUILD 40

Conference Website

A Django academic-conference site with agenda, speakers, important dates and venue map, demo-seeded.

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BUILD 41

Smart-Contract Dev Tutorial

Writing a Solidity contract, deploying it to a local chain with Hardhat, and calling it from a Python client.

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Self-Hosting & Infrastructure

12 builds
BUILD 42

Projector Control Service

Drives a projector's power, inputs and menus from a dashboard by bridging MQTT to RS232 serial commands.

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BUILD 43

NDI Video Router

A web app that discovers live NDI video sources on the network and routes any stream to chosen displays.

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BUILD 44

3D-Printable Parts Library

A catalogued, version-controlled library of 3D-printable STL parts, each with a preview and download.

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BUILD 45

Lab Provisioning Scripts

A Bash and Ansible toolkit that takes a fresh machine from bare OS to a configured, repeatable workstation.

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BUILD 46

Self-Hosted Lab Server

One server running a stack of Dockerised self-hosted services orchestrated with Compose.

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BUILD 47

Self-Hosted MQTT Broker

A private pub/sub message bus for IoT devices, pairing the EMQX broker with a Postgres registry in Docker.

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BUILD 48

Self-Hosted Push Notifications

A private notification service that pushes alerts to phone and desktop from a single HTTP request.

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BUILD 49

Observability Stack (OpenTelemetry)

An OpenTelemetry Collector feeding host metrics into a Grafana LGTM backend via Docker.

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BUILD 50

Asset Inventory System

A self-hosted IT inventory tracking assets, licenses and consumables, with check-in/out and QR codes.

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BUILD 51

3D-Printer Web Control Setup

Running 3D printers remotely from a Raspberry Pi with OctoPrint: cameras, multiple printers, slicing.

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BUILD 52

Camera Calibration Guide

Calibrating a camera and rectifying its images in ROS using a printed checkerboard.

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BUILD 53

Fast-Roaming Wi-Fi Access Point

Software APs with 802.11r fast BSS transition so a moving client hands off in milliseconds.

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Developer Tooling

3 builds