| Programming . Electronics . AI

4 min read Original article ↗

Well, retirement has finally arrived, time to get on with those personal projects I have been storing up and, of course, write my next book. However even during retirement I am always on the lookout for interesting challenges, so please feel free to contact me if you have something come up that’s a bit out of the normal. Also being retired, does not mean I have retired from my blog posts so new ones will be popping up regularly, and the old ones will still be there getting old and stale, and as irrelevant as always..

History

Roving Dynamics Ltd, was always just one guy, (Boz) who prides himself on actually making things; Whether it’s a simple software or hardware, drivers or firmware, all the way up to a complete production system, there was usually a useful product at the end of the line.

The business is currently running down, supporting some legacy systems until they reach there end of life. It did however have a proven track record of creating and supporting critical infrastructure for customers from around New Zealand. Projects such as the Indevin wine-making System which was written entirely from scratch, and used and supported for 16 years as they grew into the largest winery company in New Zealand. Or Omega seafood, which was not just the production system but also included servers, touchscreen stations and machine interfaces. Or designing electronics and drivers for another local company Vinwizard and help making them a leading player in Wine Tank Control systems, as well as many other smaller success stories.

Unlike other companies, I did not own the final system and my customers still own the IP of everything I created without restrictions, including all the design files and source code. This meant that they could work license free with any number of users, share IP with other clients or even pass them to another contractor, all to ensure no lock-down was ever made.

My goal in building the company was to publish these designs (or parts of them) to allow other engineers and interested parties improve their designs or just learn from my mistakes. However this was up to the customer to decide, not me.

I prefer the term sleeping to retirement, as I still do a lot of private research and development down various paths that sometimes lead to workable products (and sometimes fizzle out!) The company is located in Blenheim which is in the heart of New Zealand.

Boz has published four novels which fantasise about the unknown, people, politics, AI and the (generally optimistic) future of humanity. The first three books are part of The Summer of Reasoning, a near-future sci-fi trilogy, the series has been combined into a single book, and is now available as a free download. The fourth book, A Level of Consciousness, published in 2024, is a stand-alone techno-thriller available on-line everywhere in e-book or paperback. I am currently working on my fifth book

I have never had a social media presence, instead I occasionally write technical, non-technical, humorous, cynical and speculative blog posts detailing my projects, the progress and pitfalls of my journey through life, and my battle to keep a sense of focus in a world of rapid change. You can follow this journey by clicking the links to the right. If you do need to get in touch I do have very aggressive spam filters on my email so no attachments or links and ensure you make the title as relevant as possible. Retirement also means not checking your emails every day so don’t be surprised if I don’t reply instantly. My contacts page has all the details.