Lab
The things built for no client at all.
Hardware, home infrastructure and side systems. This is where the techniques that end up in production get tried first, usually badly, usually at two in the morning.
Everything on this page exists because a problem was annoying enough to solve properly. None of it was billed, most of it runs on hardware that cost less than a monitor, and several of the techniques went straight into paid work afterwards.
Fleet
A small estate of single-board computers doing real jobs: print servers, media nodes, a wall-mounted status display, an off-grid document library, environmental sensing. Managed the same way a production estate is — monitored, backed up, and expected to come back on its own after a power cut.
Robotics
A six-axis arm with a gripper, driven from a workstation rather than a canned controller. Mostly an excuse to work in inverse kinematics and to learn exactly how a servo behaves at the end of its travel, which it turns out is by stalling and getting hot.
Media systems
Home media infrastructure, tvOS builds, and the sort of format archaeology that comes with owning physical discs in 2026. The useful part is the transcode pipeline, which is the same problem as a delivery spec, only nobody is paying for it.
Why any of it matters
Because the failures are the same. A Pi that stops reporting is the same class of problem as a satellite truck that will not lock, and being the person who has already debugged the small version at home is what makes the expensive version survivable.
Individual write-ups going up here as they are documented.
