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, find me on Mastodon at @ian@mastodon.radio, or on the air as 2E0UXV.

Recent Projects

Big Mouth Phatt Bass

To quote Winston Churchill, “No hour of life is wasted, that is spent making a Billy Bass play techno.”

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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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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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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 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.

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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

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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Lego Turtle

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.

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More Projects »

Blog

Meshtastic!

Written on Friday 1 Mar 2024

Meshtastic really seems to be taking off at the moment—certainly at work, and it seems in the wider world as well. If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s software designed to run on cheap LoRa radio boards like these, and provide an “off-grid” messaging and tracking capability. It fills...

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Setting up Proxmox on the Home Lab

Written on Sunday 18 Feb 2024

I have spent the last couple of days moving my two “home lab” servers over to using Proxmox Virtual Environment as their base operating system. This is the latest step in my attempt to separate out and containerise the tasks that run on our home network. Starting from one very...

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A New Project: Plane/Sailing Portable

Written on Saturday 18 Nov 2023

As I lamented a few years back while first putting the Plane/Sailing system together, my location down in a “dip” prevents me having line of sight to any AIS-equipped vessels or APRS transponders. While AIS coverage is surprisingly workable, APRS tends to only get a few packets in if someone...

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Miscellaneous

CV & Career Explorer

Find out what I've been paid to do over the years!

View my CV »

Go to Career Explorer »
Photography

A bunch of my best photos over the years.

View the Photos »
Film Reviews (by the Numbers)

By the combined powers of Netflix and cheap cider, the Saturday Night Shenanigans crew presents… largely incoherent mocking of films!

Let's mock some films! »