Made for the real world.

A custom-machinery shop in the Free State, South Africa, building bagging, screening and packaging machines for agriculture and mining. There are three partners and I am one of them. Every machine is hand-built for a specific client and a specific material flow. There is no catalogue and no mass production.

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.

An internet-connected gate-motor controller and anti-theft alarm that lives inside the motor’s own enclosure. A five-wire field hookup, tolerant of 12 V and 24 V, slots into any common South African gate-motor brand. Built and sold under RND Automation.

• Open the gate three ways. Call from a whitelisted phone (it hangs up and opens, so no airtime is 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 and call alert. Arm and disarm it 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 through 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 comparison, 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. It adds 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 and weather-sealed where it counts.

Fleet location and trip progress built around the Android phones already in company vehicles. A clear company view shows what is moving, what is standing still, what has gone out of contact and how far an active trip still has to go.

Tracking is visible on the phone, limited by the company’s declared purpose and working hours, and backed by consent records and an audit trail. Parked phones check in, offline positions queue until signal returns, and signed progress or arrival updates can feed the company’s own systems.

A free Windows app that turns an ordinary webcam into a hand-gesture mouse. Point to move the pointer; pinch thumb and finger to click, double-click, drag or right-click; make a V to scroll; and use both hands to rotate, zoom and pan 3D models in SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Blender or Onshape. AI agents such as Claude can connect to it through an optional local API.

Everything runs on the PC, and Hand Control never uploads camera images. A snapshot reaches an AI agent only if you allow it. An optional mode recognises the owner’s face and follows only their hands. The app installs without administrator rights and offers updates from this site, installing one only when you say yes.

Face-scan time and 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, with 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. It runs as a multi-tenant Node and Postgres system with a Python face-recognition matching service.

A Telegram-and-web CRM for small businesses: quoting, scheduling, invoicing and follow-ups. The phone is the office. It is built for anyone who sends a quote or an invoice, whether that is a second-hand shop, a maker, a service business or a trade. There is no app to install and no separate UI to learn. Message TradeJot the way you would message a client, or do it all from the web dashboard.

Built around how small South African businesses actually work. It is multi-tenant, with a Telegram bot and a full web dashboard, so the business keeps running even if one channel goes down. Postgres holds the state, Node.js runs the worker, and tenant data is encrypted at rest.

A doorbell with no doorbell. A visitor at your gate opens a link and your phone rings on Telegram, wherever you are. You see them, speak to them and decide. Nothing is installed at the gate, and nothing is installed on their phone.

The hardware problem goes away: no wiring, no intercom handset, no visitor app. A printed code at the gate is the entire installation. It runs on Node and Postgres, with WebRTC video over a self-hosted relay so a call still connects on the mobile networks people actually have.

A privacy-by-design, cross-firm incident index for licensed South African security firms. It is 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: gated on a lawful basis, with a full audit trail on every action, strict access control and a fail-closed messaging layer. It runs on Node and Postgres with a face-matching service, the same secure stack behind Werktyd.

An Android companion that gives a phone a face. She talks with you, learns who you are and remembers what matters. She thinks with your own AI key, so you pay the AI company for what you use.

What she learns about faces, and your AI keys, stay encrypted on the phone. Her memories are kept there too, and she shares the ones that matter with your AI company when you talk. Flora is free, as a direct Android download that checks for updates when you ask.

A Paper plugin that turns any Minecraft server into a fully managed environment. It includes a real-time web dashboard, roles and protections, grief protection, chat moderation, bans with appeals, scheduled backups, Bedrock and Java voice chat and linked servers.

Built and run on our own Minecraft servers, which are offline for now. The NovaSync page says how to lock the dashboard down.

A Minecraft Fabric mod that adds a voice-controlled AI companion to your world. It plays beside you: it fights, mines, smelts, cooks, crafts and follows spoken instructions, with building on the way. It is designed to feel like a real friend who is good at the game.

Quantum is the in-progress successor to my earlier Nova mod, which grew to about 30 000 lines over a long history and is now archived. Quantum is a clean rebuild from the lessons learned: a smaller surface area, correct to vanilla rules, and safe across versions.