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Chris Woods

Over 20 years of experience in the software industry working with embedded C++ at Symbian (Nokia) to global systems at Microsoft, and 10+ years of research experience for Intel, Huawei and Siemens.

Check out my LinkedIn

I can’t help tinkering, and working on ideas and concepts. From the simple to the more complex, here are an example of some of the “home” projects I’ve been working on.

Robot Spelling

This online learning tool was created to help my 2nd grader, and 3rd grader with their spelling homework. Rather than have an adult tell them they spelt a word wrong, the computer will try to phonetically read the words they spell, allowing the student to discover what they may have got wrong. I shared with my sons’ school teacher and principle, and his class is now using Robot Spelling as a teaching aid. You can use Robot Spelling today, just go to RobotSpelling.com

RobotSpelling Blog Post..

Waggle My Mouse

Are you lucky enough to own a large hi-resolution monitor, use Windows ? Do you ever loose your mouse pointer. Simply waggle it and the Waggle My Mouse will draw large bright concentric crayon coloured circles around where your mouse is. It is best to disable this during game play, but for creative work it is really awesome. I wrote this to scratch my own itch, I was lucky enough to upgrade my home monitor and losing the mouse pointer used to really annoy me. You can grab your own copy of Waggle My Mouse from Gum Road here.

Online Store (Gumroad)

Podcast: Industrial Research

There is a difference between academic and commercial / industrial research. In this mini-series I distill down the processes used to guide research. This is based on my experience at Huawei, Intel, and Siemens in addition to the approaches used by visionaries. It covers the process, not the technology and provides a reusable method that anyone can use to help them create the future. Available on Apple, Google & Spotify a, along with written material to support you here.

Written Content

Reducing Costs of IoT Communication

I’ve been looking at the cost of cellular IoT, it is expensive. Most tooling from many of the major cloud providers uses a communication protocol called MQTT. It is a neat protocol. But just keeping the connection between a server and the client device can cost $10 a year per device. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but scale that up to 20, 50, perhaps 1000 devices and that’s a huge cost per year, a cost that can be saved. Smart programming can address this, as can a handy library I started work on. This is still work in progress

Blog Post