Welcome to the hardware & robots area of my site. Here you’ll find build diaries, explanations, photos and videos of all the hardware I’ve built or hacked together by cramming Raspberry Pis inside childrens’ toys.

Plane/Sailing is my home aircraft and ship tracker. It receives ADS-B and AIS signals via antennas on my house, processes them to share with popular tracking websites, and displays the combined results on a website for the world to see.

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

USV-01 "Harry Paye" is an off-the-shelf remote control boat refitted as a testbed for an autonomous navigation system. It's also a lot of fun to play with!

My first Quadcopter was built from scratch to navigate autonomously using the built-in Raspberry Pi. It also streams live video via WiFi.

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.

The All-Terrain Pi is a "off-road" remote control toy fitted with a Rasbperry Pi, controllable from Scratch or by touch/tilt input from a smartphone.

My "Radio Shack" page has a few details of my current radio setup, including the hardware for Plane/Sailing and general Ham Radio equipment.

The 2E0UXV "Random Shit I Found in my Shed" Antenna, the first antenna I built, costing precisely £0.00.

I built my own ADS-B receiver to track flights taking off from the nearby airport, using a Raspberry Pi and an SDR dongle. This was the predecessor to "Plane/Sailing", and is still operational as part of it.

Our pet gecko has an instrumented and automated vivarium. The Gecko Cam page explains the hardware and software setup.

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

My "Fun with Playbulb" post includes example code for controlling a Playbulb LED light from your computer via bluetooth, and setting the colour according to mailbox status or weather.

Over-Engineered Cat Deterrent is currently just a few sketches, from which I might build something eventually.