Portfolio #

Contents #

Tailstock - engineering consulting #

year: 2020-2026
project: Various

I sometimes work as a freelance consultant on projects, under the umbrella of Tailstock Research. I mostly work by myself, but for larger tasks I assemble small teams of freelancers. You can find some of the projects that I've been involved in below.

Luft - electrified heat #

year: 2022-2024
project: Startup - decarbonising residential heating

At Luft, my cofounder and I worked on cleaning up residential heating, which is one of the lowest-hanging fruit of the energy transition, but it is not decarbonising as fast as it should be. We looked at a bunch of ways of doing it, from tiny residential heat pumps to city-sized large thermal energy storages.

I learned a lot about entrepreneurship, the built environment, and project finance.

Luft also got me interested in the energy system and technoeconomic analysis (TEA). You can see one of our TEAs here.

Entrepreneurs First - venture builder #

year: 2021
Project: Company builder - hardware project management tools

I joined Entrepreneurs First, a venture builder, to learn about entrepreneurship. I've always been frustrated with software tools available to hardware engineers, so during my time at EF I worked on version control and file sharing for mechanical engineers.

Recurse Center - programming retreat #

year: 2021
project: Programming retreat

I'm a member of Recurse Center - a programming community focused on self-directed learning. . In 2021 I took three months off to attend an RC batch and improve my knowledge of computer science fundamentals.

RCs is the most wholesome engineering community I've encountered.

Shield Force - manufacturing protective equipment during COVID #

year: 2020
project: PPE manufacturing organisation

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I got together with a few friends from the Edinburgh Hacklab to think how we could use our skills to help during the crisis. A friendly doctor said that she could not buy face shields - an indispensable piece of PPE for healthcare workers working with infectious patients.

We immediately produced 5 prototypes based on available open-source designs, and collected feedback from ICUs. We set up a manufacturing facility for the winning design, staffed by volunteers from the local community. We built an automated 3D printer farm and optimised it for speed. Within a week, we were producing 500 units per day. Within two - 1000. This still wasn't enough to keep up with the demand, so we quickly moved to injection moulding.

Our injection moulded design went through 13 iterations with clinicians (within two weeks). We optimised everything, from the optical properties of the transparent visor, to the stiffness of the headband. This close feedback loop paid off - doctors preferred our final design to the ones they used to buy from regular suppliers. Our shield passed CE testing to EN166 standard at the first go. We eventually delivered almost 50000 shields to hospitals all around the world, from the Scottish Borders to Bethlehem in Palestine.

This was my first attempt at building an organisation. In addition to managing projects and people, I was responsible for operations - setting up and scaling the factory, ordering parts and supplies, maintaining cash flow etc. We grew exponentially - from a handful of people to over 100 within a month, and so did our production capability. Fortunately, after 4 months, we were no longer needed, as conventional suppliers have caught up with demand.

This work was featured in the BBC, The Guardian, The Scotsman, and The Herald.

Teaching a robot to walk - RL robotics control #

year: 2019
project: Soft robotics platform controlled by a deep reinforcement learning algorithm

I saw a video of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm learning how to walk on a four-legged simulated robot, and I decided to build a real-life version of it for my Master's thesis. My advisor, dr Adam Stokes from the Soft Systems Group at the University of Edinburgh, was exploring control methods for soft robots at the time;he suggested that I use a soft robot as my test platform.

Soft robots are made from compliant materials, which makes them robust and safe when interacting with humans, but also difficult to control using conventional methods, and computationally expensive to simulate. In my thesis I applied RL to teach a robot to walk, in real time, on physical hardware. I built the entire technology stack for this project.

The robot learned how to move forward. It was of course much slower than hand-coded, open-loop control methods, but it developed two distinct, novel gaits. You can find more details in my thesis.

Artemis - industrial hydraulics #

year: 2018
project: Design, testing, control of hydraulic machinery

Artemis Intelligent Power was a spin-out from Edinburgh University. They invented a new type of hydraulic machine, much more efficient and controllable than state-of-the art. Artemis is where I learned how to do real engineering. I first joined them for an industrial internship, and then came back straight after university for my first job. First, I was part of their mechanical design team, where I designed, assembled, and tested 100kW+ machines. Work at Artemis was very hands on - they taught me how to run a lathe and a mill, how to build hydraulic circuits, how to instrument test rigs, how to work with technicians and suppliers etc. Then, I joined the Controls team, where I worked on the models and software that controlled the machines. I learned how to build dynamic models in Matlab/Simulink, how to build electronics and control systems, how to design things etc.

Side project - DDPlayer #

During my time at Artemis, I realised that the valves on their machines switch so fast, that they could be used to play music. I hacked a pump controller, connected a MIDI keyboard to a Raspberry Pi, wrote some C to interface between the two, and got this:

UHTS - energy storage #

year: 2017
project: Control system for an energy storage rig

UHTS stands for Ultra-High Temperature Energy Storage - storing energy at grid scale, in a well-insulated lump of molten metal. I worked for a research group led by dr Adam Robinson, which was later spun-out as Exergy3. My job was to develop a control system for their first prototype.