What I’ve learned from refining the Protoworks service offerings, simplifying the options and making room for smaller, iterative projects.
Welcome to JKTDEV.CO.UK — my personal engineering notebook, where I document projects, experiments, build logs, lessons learned, and the occasional technical rabbit hole along the way.
I’ve worked in and around software development for over 20 years, across everything from large-scale enterprise systems to embedded software, automation, hardware-adjacent projects, and practical prototyping. More recently, my focus has shifted further into electronics, PCB design, embedded systems, radio, test equipment, manufacturing, and small hardware building blocks.
At heart, I’m a tinkerer and builder. I enjoy projects that force me to learn something new — whether that means writing code, debugging hardware, designing a PCB, testing a tool, bringing up a board, or working out why something that looked simple on paper is misbehaving on the bench.
This site is where I capture that process — warts and all.
Some articles are polished write-ups. Others are closer to field notes from whatever I am working on at the time. That might include designing a circuit, ordering PCBs, testing a regulator under load, debugging an embedded board, experimenting with radio, trying out tools, or documenting the decisions behind a prototype.
A lot of the content now revolves around electronics, embedded systems, PCB design, practical prototyping and the process of turning ideas into working hardware. Software development, automation, AI, amateur radio and the occasional unrelated technical experiment still make appearances along the way.
Much of the engineering work documented here also feeds into Protoworks, my product design and prototyping business in Northern Ireland, including its Building Block Boards, UCMOD modules, tools and other products. I also run Ards Tech Fix, providing practical software troubleshooting and workflow automation for local businesses across the Ards Peninsula. JKTDEV remains my personal engineering notebook — a place for documenting the work, learning, mistakes and thinking behind those builds, as well as projects that have nothing to do with either business.
Recent articles are listed below.
Belfast Tech Week
A few thoughts from Belfast Tech Week, including AI agents, AI security, CI/CD automation and the current Belfast technology scene.
Refining the UCMOD Architecture
Refining the UCMOD architecture by defining a clearer boundary between microcontroller modules and carrier boards.
Giving AI Agents a Way to Talk to Protoworks
Experimenting with an MCP service that gives AI agents a way to discover Protoworks, explore its services and communicate asynchronously with a human.
A Morning at a Manufacturing Trade Show
A short trip away from the development bench to see what is happening elsewhere in manufacturing and engineering.
Debugging 921600 Baud on the ATtiny1614
Debugging a 921600 baud USART problem on the ATtiny1614 while porting code from Arduino and megaTinyCore to plain C.
PICkit 5, GCBASIC and a Logic Green Rabbit Hole
Testing the PICkit 5 with the UCMOD-0, moving from Arduino to plain C with MPLAB, and disappearing down a couple of 8-bit microcontroller rabbit holes.
Revisiting Some Internal Development Tools
Revisiting two small Go command-line utilities I originally built for my own development workflow: db-concat for assembling parameterised SQL and text files, and repo-status for managing multiple local Git repositories.
AI Writes the Code, I Still Engineer the Software
How I’ve integrated LLMs into my software development workflow while keeping architecture, code review and engineering responsibility firmly in human hands.
Pruning the Pipeline, Renaming UCMOD and Building an Authentication API
Pruning the Protoworks development pipeline, introducing a clearer naming scheme for UCMOD modules, and starting work on a lightweight JWT authentication API.
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