Hi! I'm Ian Renton. By day, I am a software and systems engineer in the naval defence industry, specialising in command & control of autonomous vehicles and communications networks. By night I build robots and web applications, and play with radios, alongside being a husband, father, cook and gardener.
Here's the latest from my blog:
If you know much about me, you’ll probably know that I like “factory games” a lot. My stupid head won’t let me relax at any point, but at least I can constantly improve, expand, optimise; each day ending in a better place than it began. Factorio and Satisfactory have long been vices of mine, but recently I’ve started getting into Dyson Sphere Program—and it is gorgeous. Rather than spamming Mastodon constantly with pictures no-one cares about, I thought I’d share...
Here are some of my projects:
"Plane/Sailing" is my home aircraft and ship tracker. It receives ADS-B, AIS & APRS 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Lego Turtle is an Arduino microcontroller retro-fitted onto an old Lego Mindstorms kit. It features a built-in interpreter for simple Logo programs loaded via the serial port.
A guide on how to install Linux, plus a few bonus operating systems, on the low-cost Linx 1010B Windows tablet.
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.
A quick weekend project to help my kid make money in the Hypixel Skyblock Minecraft server, this has simple tool has rapidly become the most searched-for of all my software.
A quick-and-dirty 2D RTS game inspired by the unit customisation mechanics of Warzone 2100.
“Career Explorer” is my online CV, an interactive map where you can pan around to see where I’ve been and what I’ve done in my professional career. I also have a more formal CV online.
By the combined powers of Netflix and cheap cider, the Saturday Night Shenanigans crew presents… largely incoherent mocking of films!
A bunch of my best photos over the years.
