Ian Renton

Software engineer and builder of robots
Bournemouth, UK

Hi! I'm Ian. My hobbies include tinkering with robots, radios and computers. For work I do the same stuff but get paid for it. I'm also a keen amateur cook, gardener and photographer.

You can email me at ian@ianrenton.com, view my CV, or find me on the air as MØTRT.

Recent Projects

Field Spotter

An easy-to-use, mobile-first Amateur Radio spotting tool for POTA, SOTA & WWFF. It provides a geographical and band position display, with filtering, to allow you to easily find park-to-park and summit-to-summit contacts.

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The “Worked Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” Award

Scamming my way to Imaginary Ham Radio Points using a hacky GeoPandas script.

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Big Mouth Phatt Bass

To quote Winston Churchill, “No hour of life is wasted, that is spent making a Billy Bass play techno.” Big Mouth Phatt Bass is a Billy Bass hack using an ESP32 microcontroller to sync the fish motion to a variety of new songs.

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Plane/Sailing Portable

“Plane/Sailing Portable” is a tiny RTL-SDR-based receiver for ADS-B, AIS and APRS signals, which can feed web-based tracking services and the main Plane/Sailing system to improve coverage.

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Famous Projects

Raspberry Tank

The Raspberry Tank was possibly the first tank-like robot powered by a Raspberry Pi, way back in 2012. It’s smartphone- or laptop-controlled, streams video from its webcam, fires plastic pellets and can navigate autonomously.

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Plane/Sailing

“Plane/Sailing” is my home tracker for aircraft, ships and more! It receives radio signals via antennas on my house, processes them to share with popular tracking websites, and displays the combined results on a website using military symbology.

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Linux on Linx 1010B Tablet

A guide on how to install Linux, plus a few bonus operating systems, on the low-cost Linx 1010B Windows tablet.

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Roast Dinner Timing Chart

Some Javascript magic to help you cook the perfect Sunday roast. Simply select your ingredients and a time to serve, and it will generate you a list of timed steps.

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Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar Flipping Calculator

A quick weekend project to help my kid make money in the Hypixel Skyblock Minecraft server, this simple JavaScript tool has rapidly become the most searched-for of all my software.

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Older Projects

Home Meteogram Display

My home Meteogram display is a passive weather and calendar display that lives in the kitchen and provides a customised weather forecast for the coming days on an ultra-wide screen.

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USV-01 “Harry Paye”

USV-01 “Harry Paye” is an off-the-shelf remote control boat refitted as a testbed for an autonomous navigation system, capable of speeds up to 40 knots.

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Quadcopter

Because the Raspberry Tank was confined to just the two boring dimensions, I built a quadcopter and put a Raspberry Pi on that too. It features live video streaming and is switchable between remote and autonomous control.

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All-Terrain Pi

The All-Terrain Pi is a “off-road” remote control toy fitted with a Raspberry Pi, with live video streaming, controllable by touch/tilt input from a smartphone, and capable of running programs written in Scratch.

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Blog

POTA Activation Report: Poor Common

Written on Thursday 31 Oct 2024

There are dozens, if not hundreds of places in the UK called “Poor Common”; land granted many centuries ago by the local Lord to ordinary people so that they had somewhere to graze their livestock. But this one, GB-1723 Poor Common Nature Reserve is the only one in the POTA...

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POTA Activation Report: Canford Cliffs

Written on Monday 28 Oct 2024

It’s a week of leave from work, I have nothing urgent to do, and so: my second POTA activation in two days! This one had a very different feel to Saturday’s sunny afternoon activation. The day dawned damp and windy, but at least not actively raining—sadly, that was to change...

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POTA Activation Report: Hengistbury Head

Written on Saturday 26 Oct 2024

After JOTA, where my daughter casually snagged her first transatlantic SSB contact, I decided to set myself a goal: by the end of the year, I was going to have my first transatlantic POTA park-to-park.

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