It’s been just over a year since I last posted here – and it’s been a busy year.
I’m aiming to start posting a bit more frequently (though I’ve said that before…), so I thought I’d start with an update of what I’ve been up to since my last post.
Work
Last October I started a new contract with Anglo American, a global mining and minerals company. They brought me in to work develop a new system called Image Hub, which will provide a central place to store, search, visualise and process image data. We’re focusing mainly on satellite and aerial images at the moment, but will be expanding to other sorts of geospatial and non-geospatial in the future.
I started as part of a very small team (me and one other person), evaluating a range of technologies to solve this problem. We then progressed to building some prototypes, and now have an initial working system in pre-production. We’re starting to get more people on the team and are working towards getting a full system in production.
I’ve really enjoyed getting stuck into the Cloud Native Geospatial ecosystem – including Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalogs, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs and the various associated technologies. I’d used these before as a data consumer, but now I’ve been on the other side, setting up STAC API servers, converting data to COGs. setting up Tilers.
I attended the Cloud Native Geospatial Day 2022 and gave a talk on our work at Anglo, which you can watch below:
Although my work with Anglo is taking most of my time, I’ve kept going with a bit of other work including some consulting on Py6S.
Electromagnetic Field
I attended Electromagnetic Field with my family during the May half-term. EMF is a science/technology/electronics/computing/general-geek festival held in a field in Herefordshire. We camped there (the first time my son had been camping) and had a wonderful time.
I did a couple of workshops where I built a Z80-based computer and a Geiger counter and my wife did some soldering workshops and a blacksmithing workshop. My son (only 5 years old) even made and launched a solid-fuelled rocket!
As well as all the workshops there were some fascinating talks – and I also gave a talk titled Learning from accidents: an introduction to railway signalling in the UK. It was heavily based on one of the talks that I give to science/technology societies (see my talks page) but extended and altered a bit for the EMF audience. All the talks were videoed, so I’ll post a link here when the video is available.
Fun evening activities
Since coming back from EMF I’ve been inspired to do some interesting things in the evenings. This is partly because a friend gave me a 3D printer at EMF, so I’ve been having fun getting to grips with that. I’ve also had fun using the things I made in the workshops at EMF. Some of the things I’ve been up to include:
- Designing (using Fusion 360) and 3D printing a mini balloon-powered hovercraft
- Printing a load of cool 3D prints from sites like Thingiverse
- Connecting my Geiger counter (from EMF) to a Raspberry Pi (and later to an Arduino, and the EMF badge) to get count data out, and to generate true random numbers
- Writing programs in Z80 assembler (just like my father did many years ago) – which has been fascinating, and a nice change from the modern ‘wire all these APIs together and try and work out which dependency has a bug that’s causing your problem’ approach to programming
I’m hoping to write some posts here on some of these activities – stay tuned to hear more…