About Me
This section lists some of the things I have done over the past 23 years.
For more detailed or up to date information you can checkout the following sites
Sussex University Profile
Linked In Profile
Present Day
I currently live in Brighton and I am studying and working at Sussex University where my aim is to graduate with a PhD in Electronic Engineering in 2011.
My Past
Electronics
My interests mainly revolve around electronics and computers, 2 things I have been interested in my whole life. I was introduced to electronics by my Dad when I was about 6, and to computers when I was about 10, my primary school got one when I was in year 10 and we got one at home shortly after (a 200Mhz Packard Bell costing over £1000!).
Around this time I started attending a radio and electronics evening course and shortly after aged 11 I got a City and Guilds in Amateur Radio and Electronics.
For the next few years nothing much happened, that was until the BBC started the Robot Wars series on BBC2; a year or two later with the help of my Dad I built my own robot which I now know to be complete crap. I entered this robot into the 2nd or 3rd series of Robot Wars unfortunately due to an accident with other robots during filming they cancelled the feather weight and light weight categories which I was part of. Looking back I am glad this happened as it would have been incredibly embarrassing going out with the robot I had.
A year or two later when I was at 6th form college I built my first coil gun; this was the first major build I had done. The coil gun was fairly successful; the gun used about 6 solenoids to propel a steel bolt down a plastic tube, the solenoids were triggered as the bolt passed a light gate just before the coil. The electronics including batteries were mounted in a flight case so the whole thing was portable.
2 years after that when I started at Sussex University I began working on an autonomous robot for a competition called the Melexis Safety Trophy, this was an international competition setup by a manufacturer of sensors in an attempt to come up with a robotic vehicle that was capable of detecting and avoiding obstacles whilst traveling to a finishing point.
The robot I constructed wasn't particularly good; the robot needed to be able to detect and identify obstacles of which there were 3 types, a brick, a cold tin can and a hot tin can, it had to identify them as it had to go around bricks avoid hot cans and knock over cold cans. The robot I built had 5 proximity sensors on the front which allowed to detect with some success the difference between a brick and a can but not a hot or cold can. The robot also had to detect lines on the ground around the course as well as a flashing beacon this acted as the finish, it didn't do either very well but the one thing that did help was a compass. Before the competition started it was set so that it would simply drive to the end of the course avoiding obstacles, this worked so well I came second beaten by a robot made of Lego.
For some more information you can read the Melexis project page.
About 2 to 3 years ago I built the second Coil Gun, details including pictures can be found on the Coil Gun page.
About 2 years ago I started on a Balancing Robot, details of this can be found on the robots page.
When I started at Sussex University I joined the Mountaineering Club, I have always has a slight interest in climbing but never been able to do anything about it, the School and Collage I went to had a very limited range of clubs.
For the first 2 years at University I was an active member of the club and committee, unfortunately because of increasing work loads I have had to let this slide in the last 2 years of my degree although I am back there now doing the same job.
Computers
As mentioned previously I have also been interested in computers, one thing that came from this was an interest in website design; the first sites I designed were really awful with little or no content.
About 4 years ago I started a company called a star solutions, I did this for several reasons, firstly I have always wanted to run my own company and secondly it was a reason for me to build a website.
'a star solutions' is an online store selling audio and video leads, accessories and adapters (a topic I knew a bit about), the first website was built using an online website building package, as you can imagine it wasn't very good. The next version of the site was built using a software package "Actinic", this website was better but the software was very limited and prevented me from creating the site I wanted.
The next version of the site I built from scratch, it was built on Microsoft's Active Server Page technology with a back-end MySQL database, this website was hosted on my own server. I decided to host it my self as it gave me more involvement in the computer side of things and more control over the websites settings.
A year after this site was built I started working on a new version written in php and after about 6 to 12 months of intermittent work I changed the site over.
During this time I have been expanding and upgrading my servers and network, I currently have a network consisting of 2 web servers / database servers, 1 mail server / domain controller and 1 VoIP server. There are also a few other machines dealing with other tasks such as CCTV and data logging.
I currently host several websites, including 'a star solutions' website, this site, my blog and a couple of other internal sites.
One of the main reasons I have for doing this is the experience it gives me, I now have a fairly good working knowledge of several web programing languages, operating systems and software packages such as Apache and MySQL and also network design, installation and maintenance.
