Most of these run in production today, serving real users; a couple are in
active development toward launch. Every card is tagged so you know exactly
where it stands — no vapour, no prototypes dressed up as products.
Industrial & embedded
Machinery, gate control, and field electronics
Co-founderActive since 2018
RND Automation
A custom-machinery shop in the Free State, South Africa, building
bagging, screening, and packaging machines for agriculture and
mining. Three partners; I'm one of them. Every machine is hand-built — no
catalogue, no mass production — designed for a specific client and a specific
material flow.
My side of it spans the whole machine: SolidWorks for the
mechanical and structural design; Delta PLC ladder logic
for the control programs; the electrical panel build; the on-site
commissioning; and the service callouts when something needs a tweak six months
later. Hands-on engineering, end to end.
Role
Co-founder · design · PLC programming · electrical · service
An internet-connected gate-motor controller and anti-theft alarm that lives
inside the motor's own enclosure. A five-wire field hookup (12 V / 24 V
tolerant) slots into any common South African gate-motor brand. Built and sold
under RND Automation.
ESP32-driven gate alarm triggering in the field.
Open the gate three ways: call from a whitelisted phone (it hangs up and opens — no airtime spent), SMS a passcode, or tap the button on the local Wi‑Fi dashboard.
Built-in anti-theft. A vibration sensor sealed inside the motor box detects tampering and fires an SMS + call alert. Arm and disarm from the dashboard.
Live dashboard. A mobile-friendly web UI shows signal strength, network registration, motor state, and a timestamped log of every open, wrong-code attempt, and alarm event.
Joins your home Wi‑Fi via a captive-portal setup with mDNS and an optional static IP — and falls back to its own hotspot if the network drops.
Hardens itself. CSRF defence, constant-time passcode compare, lockout after repeated wrong codes, and OTA firmware updates with automatic rollback.
A reverse-tunnel bridge to the Seidr Labs server is rolling out now, adding
remote access, Telegram notifications, and a QR-code visitor intercom — all over
the visitor's and owner's own phones, with no camera anywhere.
Microcontroller projects designed for places where reliability matters and a
technician isn't down the road. Battery-backed, watchdog-supervised,
weather-sealed where it counts.
Farm irrigation controllers
Arduino-based centre-pivot controllers for farmers. Programmed watering
cycles, sensor-driven cut-outs, manual override at the panel. Designed
so the only acceptable failure mode is "obvious enough the farmer can
fix it himself with a multimeter."
Long-range LoRa networks
LoRa radio links tying remote sensors and actuators across farm-scale
distances — kilometres, not metres, no cellular coverage required.
Sub-GHz, low-power, ideal for the gap between "needs to talk to base"
and "we can't run cable out there."
Stack
ESP32 · Arduino · Raspberry Pi · LoRa (sub-GHz)
Disciplines
Firmware · PCB · enclosures · field service
Status
Multiple units in production on farms and rural properties
Business software
Production SaaS for South African businesses
LiveNew · 2026
Werktyd
Face-scan time & attendance for South African small businesses. Workers clock
in and out with a quick face scan; owners get a web dashboard with live timesheets
and one-click payroll export. Companies sign up and onboard over Telegram and the
web — no app to install.
POPIA-built from the ground up: only a numeric face template is stored,
never the photo; a PIN alternative is always offered with no penalty for opting
out; and personal data is encrypted at rest. Multi-tenant Node + Postgres
with a Python face-recognition matching service.
A Telegram-and-web CRM for tradesmen — quoting, scheduling, invoicing, follow-ups.
The phone is the office. No app to install, no separate UI to learn — just message
TradeJot the way you'd message a client, or do it all from the web dashboard.
Built around how trades actually work in South Africa. Multi-tenant, with a Telegram
bot and a full web dashboard so the business keeps running even if one channel goes
down. Postgres for state, Node.js for the worker, encryption for tenant data at rest.
A privacy-by-design, cross-firm incident index for licensed South African
security firms — a lawful, audit-logged replacement for the informal chat
groups the industry currently relies on. Member firms check and log
cross-firm incident records through a Telegram bot or a dedicated Android app.
Built privacy-first: lawful-basis-gated, a full audit trail on every action,
strict access control, and a fail-closed messaging layer. Node + Postgres
with a face-matching service — the same secure stack behind Werktyd.
A self-hosted vehicle-tracking and immobiliser platform for South African owners
and small fleets. Live map, geofences, trip history, and remote lock / unlock —
with a custom ESP32 + cellular + GPS tracker unit being built
alongside the software.
Privacy by design: self-hosted rather than tied to a third-party tracking
company, with TOTP step-up auth on sensitive commands. SvelteKit dashboard,
Node + Postgres backend, MQTT to the field units, and firmware with a
hard safety interlock that won't immobilise a moving vehicle.
A Paper plugin that turns any Minecraft server into a fully managed environment.
Includes a real-time web dashboard, multi-server sync, an anti-cheat layer,
a role/permission system, identity linking, encrypted off-site backups, and
voice-controlled admin commands.
Used in production on multiple servers, end-to-end secured with constant-time auth,
rate-limited login, and step-up authentication for sensitive actions.
A Minecraft Fabric mod that adds a voice-controlled AI companion to your world.
Plays beside you — mines, crafts, builds, fights, follows complex instructions.
Designed to feel less like a bot and more like a real friend who's good at the game.
Quantum is the in-progress successor to my earlier Nova mod (which had ~30k lines and a
long history; it's now archived). Quantum is a clean rebuild from the lessons learned —
smaller surface area, vanilla-rule-correct, cross-version-safe.