Professional Experience

Through Electro Cat Studios we were privileged to work with clients on. This is just a selection of projects, but demonstrate the sort of things that Electro Cat Studios can do, our key strengths in terms of development and software development. This is not an exhaustive list projects but rather a sampling of projects that Electro Cat Studios has successfully delivered.

Wylam Professional Services - Bus Tracking Software

Working with Wylam Professional Services, who designed and provided the hardware, we were able to produce a device, driven primarily from a Raspberry Pi, and had a screen, GPS tracker, and an RFID reader. The project was used to help provide billing services with a school in Leeds, UK. Any student getting on the bus swiped their existing student card, the point of card swiping was tracked, recording the time and GPS location, allowing billing based on location.

The system has resilience built in to cope with intermittent 3G signal, but intermittently sends data back to the home base, allowing the tracking of children in near real-time by the school administration.

The solution was initially built using Python, with the screen driver written in C, to interact as quickly as possible with the screen buffer. Parts of the code were later re-written into Go to get better performance, the backend is a MySQL (MariaDB) database.

Defense Contractor - Video Streaming and Hardware Interfacing

(Due to contractual limitations no identifiable information is available about this project)

A rewrite of an application into Python to provide hardware interfacing and a streaming of video. The application was written in Python using Windows CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework), to allow the frontend to be crafted using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The backend leveraged Flask to provide the bindings for the interface as well as aynchronous hardware interfacing.

Life and Limb Puppets - Interactive Educational Tool

This project helped to deliver a previously in-person puppet show, during the Covid restrictions. The project was used to measure children’s mental health using the standardised framework, but delivered in a novel and accessible way. It used fun puppets, representing certain personality types and they exhibited behaviours, which the students were then encouraged to grade (in terms of relatability) using a simple coin system (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). The data was then collected and collated into the typical presentation given the framework, allowing assessment of the students to make sure they were coping well in a school environment.

The backend is written in Go and hosted on AWS, using a managed Postgres instance as the data store. There is an administrative backend to allow the course runners to access the data, and to customise certain aspects of the interface. The frontend was created in collaboration with Canada-based artist Liv Hope and leveraged Javascript, HTML, and CSS to create the animations and other interactive components, with a series of private You Tube videos to convey the puppetry.

Placechangers - 3D-mapping, with OSM data

This project was to help leverage Three.js to render a proposed building projects against the buildings in the surrounding locale. The idea was originally proposed to show allow members of the public to view the location and design of the building in a 3D view, in a web browser.

This was written in primarily Javascript, but leveraging Python to scrape the necessary tile information from a locally hosted instance of the OSM dataset in Docker. The project was a proof of concept but provided simple JSON driven solutions for the client to host their own versions of these tools, and integrate with their own existing systems.