freelance technologist, designer and writer
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Read 1 day ago and current, but nothing has been published for 19 months.
In September this year, I released a new version of the open source 16-fader MIDI controller I maintain - 16nx . This was a complete redesign of the hardware of the device, and as a result, also a completely new firmware. Redesigning the device was in one sense, a necessity. 16n - the original faderbank - was designed around the Teensy 3.2 , a microcontroller development board that had effectively…
I was working up to the wire in 2024; my main client project wrapped up on December 20th. It was an intense sprint finish to the year, and since then, after some genuine rest, I’ve mainly been getting my feet back under the desk, and slowly trying to bring the shape of 2025 into focus. What was I up to in the past six-ish months? Google Deepmind - further prototyping / exploration I returned to…
Coming up for air. What happened is: I lined up the Next Thing (as mentioned at the end of last quarter’s worknotes ), and then it promptly proceeded to entirely consume my time and brain for the next quarter. Which is good, from an income-and-labour perspective, but was somewhat to the detriment of the content strategy here, where I’d hoped to be able to write smaller, spikier pieces of content…
A quarter has passed since the last worknotes ; now’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve been up to. Lunar Energy Two pieces of work this quarter with the Design team at Lunar . I wrapped up the project mentioned at the end of 2023 in January, as I’d expected. A second project emerged in March, exploring generative/systemic graphic and motion design, and that wrapped that up this week. There…
This is a recent prototype. It’s a custom PCB that takes a single Cherry MX style keyswitch, with a resistor and an LED positioned to illuminate the keycap, broken out to pins. That’s it. It’s part of a larger prototype, that involves buttons and controls and many chips. For a while now I’ve taken to prototyping quite large electronics projects in their full, final form. That means getting a large…
I was really taken with this, which @scy (Tim Weber) posted on Mastodon the other day: The Mastodon post is very clear, so to quickly summarize: The device has crashed; it’s shared its stack trace optically, using the LED button matrix on the device. To share that stacktrace with the development team, the end-user only has to post a photograph of it to the development Discord, where an…
I recently shipped some client work - a small prototyping project - written in Python. Which is surprising, given I would say - if asked - that “ I don’t write Python “. A lot of people write a lot of Python these days. It’s a common teaching language; it’s a lingua franca for machine learning and data science; it’s used as a scripting language for products I use such as Kicad or Blender . But…
2023 was frustratingly fallow, despite all best efforts. Needless to say, not just for me - the technology market has seen lay-offs and funding cutbacks and everything has been squeezed. But after a quiet few months, the end of 2023 got very busy, and there’s been a few different projects going on that I wanted to acknowledge. It looks like these will largely be drawing to a close in early 2024,…
I’ve begun a small piece of ongoing consultancy with Promising Trouble on their Community Connectivity project. It’s a good example of the strategy and consulting work I do in my practice, alongside more hands-on technology making. Promising Trouble is working with Impact on Urban Health on a multi-year partnership to explore how access to the internet impacts health and wellbeing. I’ve been…
I’ve shared a new case study of the work I did this summer with Lunar Energy ( see previous worknotes ). As I explain at length over at the post, it’s a great example of the kind of work I relish, that that necessarily straddles design and engineering. It’s a project that goes up and down the stack, modern web front-ends talking to custom hardware, and all in the service of interaction design.…
