I'm Andrew, a thirty-something born and raised in Cornwall. With a passion for the great outdoors and technology you will typically find me ankle deep in mud, strolling down a path somewhere (likely lost) or out on the coast admiring the stunning views.
When the weather turns for the worst, yes it does rain in Cornwall, I'm behind a computer working in projects and contributing to Open Street Map (OSM).
While working within a production environment where multiple products were made. The information about sizes and materials used for each item was only known by a few people and was done by memory, there was a internal product BOM (Bill Of Materials) system in place but it had discrepancies with the product listing on the website which lead to customers getting items which didn't match the material and sizes they where expecting. General concessive was the online product listing was more accurate and that information should be used to make the product, each morning every product had to be looked up to create a material and size list so that the days production could start, this took time to do. With one computer within the production area used by the supervisor there was very limited access and time frame to do this task.
We needed a list of products (sku's), it's size, material used, and any other custom notes (e.g. stock material needs to be cut to size) in a format which didn't need access to the computer, my conclusion was to create a printable report which will be used to lookup this information.
To do this I created app which crawled (visited) all products which were manufactured from the online store front, analysed the description to get the item size, material and colour. The information gathered was stored and manually checked before being printed, there were products which didn't have the information needed, when these showed up the internal system was checked then feed back to the online team so the description could be updated.
The end result was a definitive list of products, materials and sizes which anyone could use; sped up the created of a material and size list for production; reduced the number of items with the wrong materials being sent to customers; it also identified issues with product descriptions on the website. This list could then be used to update the internal product BOM system which would improve raw material stock management.
Compares Open Street Map (OSM) data with National public transport access nodes (NaPTAN). The initial import of NaPTAN data into OSM happened on a regional bases approx 10 years ago, since then the data within OSM has become out of sync with the original dataset.
The aim is to validate this data so that it can become a usable source for UK public transport, the validation process includes: checking the existence of a bus stop (there is currently 10,500 OSM bus stops which matches a deleted a NaPTAN stop), checking the physical location of bus stops (in some cases the location given by NaPTAN does not match signage and features on the ground) and add additional information regarding the stop (e.g. is there a bench, is tactile paving used and is there a bin near by)
A hardware and website solution to create heat-maps of litter collected during a litter pick. After the litter pick the data is uploaded to the website to create a heat-map which is overlaid on aerial photos or a road map, this information could then be used to identify hot stops and where necessary new bins installed or move near by bins to a better location.
Additional information can be placed against a litter pick, e.g. types of litter collected. This can then be used get a idea to where the litter originated from. An example of this could be; fast food packing found 10 miles from the nearest takeaway, its likely dropped by someone who drove or chucked it out of the window at that location.
Designed, programmed and 3D printed a personalised Weather Display based on the ESP32 microcontroller platform. Using a Nexion touchscreen display to show hourly weather forecast from a external API as well tide, sunrise and sunset times, packaged in a custom 3D printed case.
Created as a University project, two tanks remotely controlled from the internet battle it out until there is a winner. Two WiFi devices (La Fonera FON2100) operating OpenWRT sent serial commands to a Arduino which in turn controlled the tank.
A custom web site, control and communication structure was created as well as an arena with multiple live webcam feeds to allow the players see and to control the tanks.
While the end project didn't meet the 'battle' aspect and had its limitations, it was a interesting concept and something I would like to revisit; maybe using an ESP based microcontroller, lighter tank frame with automatic charging stations. How technology has progressed in the last few years.