JAMES RICHARDS Engineer · AI systems for small firms
Doc JR-01 · Rev C
Issue 2026
Huddersfield, UK
53.65°N  1.78°W

I build AI systems that do real jobs for small businesses.

Compliance paperwork, records chasing, lead handling, monitoring — one clear outcome, checked by a human before it reaches your customer, priced simply. No jargon, no strategy decks. Systems that hold up to inspection.

01 — Capabilities
C-01

AI agents that discharge a duty

Paperwork drafted, records chased, filings prepared, incidents flagged — one metered outcome delivered every week, always reviewed by a human before it reaches your customer.

C-02

Automation & integration

I connect the tools you already use — email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, industry portals — so information moves itself instead of waiting for you at 9pm.

C-03

Engineering software

Control systems, embedded firmware, computer vision. For engineering firms that need someone who speaks both power systems and Python.

02 — Project register

Things I've actually shipped. Commercial systems first, engineering builds after — with footage where it exists.

PRJ-01 · IN SERVICE

Veterinary controlled-drugs register

A digital CD register for vet practices: badge-login kiosk by the drugs cabinet, witness sign-off, running balances, discrepancy logging and audit-ready PDF export. Built to survive an inspector, not a demo.

COMPLIANCE82 AUTOMATED TESTSKIOSK HARDWARE
PRJ-02 · LIVE PRODUCT

Retrofit Radar

Market-intelligence and outreach system for UK retrofit installers — finds grant-backed work in the EPC register and connects it to the firms equipped to do it. Customer dashboards, ranked feeds, automated compliance-checked outreach.

AI + DATAEPC REGISTERLIVE CUSTOMER DASHBOARDS
SO-101 robotic arm during an AI-driven manipulation run WATCH THE FOOTAGE
PRJ-03

SO-101 robotic arm

Built and programmed the SO-101 robotic arm for AI-driven manipulation tasks — footage of it working on the bench.

ROBOTICSAI CONTROL
Bitcoin miner hardware running WATCH THE FOOTAGE
PRJ-04

Bitcoin mining — Stratum V2

Built a working Bitcoin miner and work with the open-source Stratum V2 mining-protocol applications in Rust — real systems engineering, not crypto hype.

RUSTPROTOCOLSHARDWARE
Sortura smart bin identifying and sorting waste WATCH THE FOOTAGE
PRJ-05

Sortura smart bin

A smart bin that identifies and sorts waste automatically — sensing, actuation and product design, working on camera.

PRODUCTSENSING
Twin-hull autonomous surface vehicle with GPS receiver and sensor array in a test pool
PRJ-06

Autonomous surface vehicle

University team project: trained a YOLOv11 vision model to detect floating obstacles — wildlife, driftwood — so an uncrewed boat can navigate safely. Pictured in the test pool.

COMPUTER VISIONYOLOV11MARINE
PRJ-07

Signal to Trade — event-driven trading system

Ingests social-media posts in real time, has an LLM judge each one for market impact, and converts judgments into sized, stop-protected paper trades. 519 simulated trades, latency-decay and look-ahead-bias analysis — written up as an honest post-mortem.

LLM SYSTEMSBACKTESTING519 TRADES
READ THE CASE STUDY
PRJ-08

Rotary inverted pendulum

Swing-up and stabilisation of an inherently unstable system — real-time control engineering, from mathematical model to hardware.

CONTROL SYSTEMSREAL-TIME
PRJ-09

Micromouse

Autonomous maze-solving robot: embedded firmware, sensor fusion and path-finding on a hardware budget.

EMBEDDEDPATH-FINDING
PRJ-10

Tremor sensor

University project: a wearable tremor-measurement device — biomedical sensing and signal processing.

BIOMEDICALSIGNAL PROCESSING
03 — Method
1

A short call

Fifteen minutes to find the one job that eats your time — the paperwork, the chasing, the monitoring. If I can't help, I'll say so on the call.

2

Results in week one

I run the job myself first, with AI doing the heavy lifting and me checking every output. You see finished work before any software exists.

3

Then it runs itself

What works gets automated and keeps running weekly. Simple price per outcome, cancel anytime, and I stay the engineer on the other end.

I'm completing an MEng in General Engineering, specialising in electrical engineering, and I've been building software the whole way through. That mix matters: the hard part of most automation isn't the AI, it's the real-world process it has to respect — a controlled-drugs audit, a grid-connection application, a grant evidence pack. I build systems that hold up to inspection, not demos.