About me

I’m Daniel. I build things, and I take things apart.

Projects here start one of two ways: someone else’s problem, or my own stubbornness about wanting to know how something works.

What I make

Electronics and firmware. The timber, the woodwork and most of the homestead projects on this site are my brother’s.

The wood boiler monitor is the main one. It watches temperatures and current draw on an outdoor wood boiler and sends an alert when the fire is going out. It went in during March 2026. Through that spring it caught the fire going out almost every second day.

It runs custom C++ firmware I wrote for the ESP32: MQTT over TLS, Lua scripting that reloads without a reflash, OTA updates, cellular failover when the wifi drops, and a shell I can reach the device through from anywhere. The site is a long drive away, which is the reason for most of that list. I would rather spend a week on something once than drive out to fix it by hand.

Before that there was a pool controller for my parents, built around 2020. Filter pump and solar heat exchanger, on a board whose first revision needed patching with enameled wire. Still running.

What I work with

Whatever a job needs. Most of what ends up on this site is firmware and electronics - ESP32 and C++ at one end, a soldering iron and an oscilloscope at the other - but it spreads out from there into networks, servers, radio links, CAD, 3D printing, and a welder I bought a few years ago and can now lay a decent bead with.

Self-taught, all of it. When a job needs a tool I don’t have, I get it and work out how to use it. When the tool doesn’t exist or isn’t for sale, I build it.

What I’ve learned the hard way

Devices report that everything is fine right up until you find out it isn’t. The boiler monitor once sent metrics for days while sending no alerts at all.

So everything gets a heartbeat now. A message the device sends for no reason other than to prove it still can, and an alarm when that message stops arriving. Same idea as a dead man’s switch: you don’t watch for a failure, you watch for the absence of a normal thing. Plus watchdogs, and a deliberate reboot before something else reboots it.

What I take apart

Commercial gear that phones home, cloud-locked hardware, devices that stop being smart when the vendor loses interest.

A robot vacuum came apart on the bench. I pulled its firmware, and it now talks to my own MQTT broker instead of the manufacturer’s cloud. A smart plug runs open firmware instead of what it shipped with.

If I think the internet might find it interesting, it ends up here.

Elsewhere

Say hello

Questions, corrections, or you’re chasing something similar - [email protected].