Blog
July 2020
I'm really excited to start with Army HQ at Andover. There are some great opportunities to learn new skills, and work with new people. Lets see where this journey takes me.
July 2024
I've got an enforced 6 weeks off soon, due to a contractual issue at work. I think I'll spend it with my family, and maybe some travelling around the UK. Not a great situation to be in, but thats contracting.
September 2024
They've sorted the contract out at work, and the team are back in. Dont you hate it when you find someone else has been managing your estate while you were away, and they've screwed everything up. This will take some time to remediate.
January 2025
Who invented the Azure web interface? Compared to AWS, it's so unintuitive. I know which one I prefer. I've been designing a louvred panel to fit in the side pods of a Force TA single seater. My client is the current British Sprint Champion, and he approached me to help him improve the cooling on the car. About 15 hours have gone in to the parametric design, and the client is going to print them himself once he's happy with the design.
February 2025
I've designed some more printed parts this month, for the Radical SR3, to provide my clients car with launch and traction control. I'm now working on a Bezel design for the Plex SDM-330 display. I will be mounting it to the steering wheel, and it needs to house several switches and a joystick to allow the screens to be navigated. Time to fire up Fusion 360.
March 2025
I've been working on my clients Radical SR3 racecar. I've almost finished the re-wire, there's about 20 hours gone in to it so far.
April 2025
This month I've moved from Army HQ, to a new client based in Cheadle Heath. I've signed an NDA so cant say an awful lot. But I am now working hybrid, which will be a relief to get away from working in the home office five days a week. After five years, I'm happy to have a break.
May 2025
The work I've doing for the new client is going well. The project is right up my street. I've found a decent Bed and Breakfast, on a farm, which is 1.9 miles from the Manchester Airport runway, so I get to see the A380 takeoff most nights. Thats a heck of a large aircraft. The Plex dashboard bezel is now finished. It took three versions until I was happy with it. Here is a link to the Fusion model which can be viewed in a web browser.
July 2025
I've been working on some ABS Sensor mounts for a client in the US. These will allow the use of Bosch ABS sensors, on an MK Cup Car, as they are adding ABS using the Delta system. The sensors are two wire hall effect, and need a 330 ohm resistor on the earth wire to generate a decent signal. The designs are going well, and the 3D prints so far are meeting expectations.
September 2025
After a few weeks off for surgery, I'm back on site again and planning some major upgrades to the customers platform. I'm now up to speed with Docker, and experimenting with ollama, which is a large language model tool, containerised for running inside Docker. Make sure you start the container with --gpu=all if you want to utilise the GPU rather than the CPU. And with that in mind, I'm updating my GeForce GTX1060 6GB to a GeForce 3060 with 12GB of RAM, so I can experiment some more with CUDA.
January 2026
It was a very busy period leading up to the Christmas break, and after many midnight hours burnt, the HPC platform I'm supporting, is now running Python venv's so the mathematicians can do some very clever things, and run their scripts across multiple GPU's.March 2026
Over the past couple of months I've designed a database to hold parameters collected from the PBS workload manager, for reporting purposes. This means I can now provide my client with graphs showing the live utilisation of the platform, as well as the usage over time. I'm super proud to have made such a difference to the company. In the first quarter of 2026, we have already surpassed the walltime for the whole of 2025! My client is extremely pleased, hopefully I'll get a contract extension in April to allow me to continue with the good work.Here is a link to a virtual dashboard, which is running Javascript to emulate the changing loads on the ten nodes in this example HPC platform. The webpage you can see is generated from a python script that I wrote which performs sql queries against my database, and then builds the table, using a style sheet to control the format and layout. The javascript code in the virtual dashboard, loads when the page is opened, but it takes effect after five seconds and then updates every five seconds, so load it and wait five seconds, and it will start to simulate the real dashboard.
