Projects

Small things, made to solve a specific problem. Apps, printable models, and whatever else turns out to be the right answer.

AuraPath

  • App
  • In progress

An early Unity prototype that brightens and outlines what the camera sees and shows it back in stereo through a cheap headset. Aimed at retinitis pigmentosa, where night vision and peripheral vision go first.

See what it does →

Visually impaired badge

  • 3D printable
  • Released

A 58mm two-colour badge carrying the international symbol for visual disability, with the wording curved around the rim in English, Italian, French, Spanish or Japanese. Print it yourself for pennies.

Download and print Free. Needs a 3D printer, or someone with one.

What might come next

Not a backlog, and not a roadmap. These are things I have run into often enough to want fixed, written down with enough detail that somebody else could take one. If you do, it is yours, and I would rather it existed than that I owned it.

A clip to put a torch on a cane

A small bright torch is one of the most useful things a partially sighted person can carry, and holding one while using a cane means having no hand left. A printed clip that grips a cane and holds a torch the size of an Olight Baton 4 would fix that for the cost of the plastic.

The hard part is that it must not change how the cane behaves. No weight near the tip, nothing that catches, and it has to come off in one movement without tools. Cane diameters vary, so it wants to be parametric rather than one size.

Done looks like a printed clip somebody uses for a week and forgets about. Probably a weekend, most of it spent on the grip.

A browser extension that rewrites a site to suit you

Colour inversion and browser zoom get you a long way, and then a site defeats them. Text baked into an image, contrast that fails in one corner, a layout that reflows into a column two words wide. What you actually want is for the page to be adjusted the way you would adjust it, if you could write CSS and had the time.

An extension that takes a site once, looks at it against what a particular reader needs, and writes a stylesheet. Then applies it every visit from then on, with no model involved.

The interesting part is that it runs once per site rather than once per page load. That makes it fast, private, and near enough free. It would use the reader’s own API key, so there is no service to run, nothing to pay for, and nothing sent anywhere they have not chosen.

The hard part is knowing when it has made things worse, and letting someone say so and try again. A wrong stylesheet on a site you rely on is worse than no stylesheet.

Done looks like a reader turning it on for a site that has always been awkward and simply reading it. This one is a proper project, not a weekend.

More printable things

A printer turns out to be a good answer to a lot of small problems, and the models cost pennies. This is where the next one probably comes from.

If you have run into something a small object or a small app would fix, tell me. That is genuinely how the last two started.