Samples of personal projects for Ross Arnold. Does not include any paid/work projects.
birdbird
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What?
Process motion-captured clips from a bird feeder cam, present results on the web. Includes species detection (audio and video). See it in action at birdbird.
Why?
Sharpen my AI-assisted development skills. Provided close direction, requirements clarity, quality oversight, and design decisions - leveraging Claude Code for implementation while maintaining full project vision and technical governance. More detail in birdbird - Human Contribution Summary.
Tech
- FFmpeg for general processing of input clips
- ML inference using publicly available pre-trained models:
- Trim input clips to keep segments with birds. YOLOv8 + COCO dataset.
- Identifies bird vocalisations using BirdNET
- Identifies bird visuals using BioClip (optionally, process on remote GPU)
- Deploys on Cloudflare Workers and R2.
See birdbird credits for full list of dependencies used.
n8n workflows
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What?
Set up various workflow orchestrations for personal tasks on an n8n instance self-hosted on GCP, with:
- 20+ Node Types & Integrations: Includes diverse n8n capabilities including API integrations (GitHub, OpenWeatherMap), data processing (JavaScript, conditional logic, batch operations), scheduled execution, and data storage (n8n Data Tables, BigQuery)
- Multi-Source Data Aggregation & Reporting: Multi-workflow automation systems including master/child workflow patterns for scalable operations, with 30+ node workflows handling parallel data collection, conditional logic, and error handling
- Error Handling: Designed instance-wide error monitoring using Error Trigger workflows that capture failure details (stack traces, last node, retry info) and deliver actionable alerts via Gmail integration
- DevOps Integration: Implemented automated GitHub-based version control for n8n workflows with intelligent change detection, comparing JSON structures to determine “new/different/same” states and auto-committing workflow updates with appropriate metadata
Workflow outputs include*: custom graph of cloud costs, AI summary of news/sport, local weather warnings, local flood status as a custom graph, email notifications for new software versions and infrequently updated rss feeds, auto publish summary (static html) to Cloudflare worker, auto backup n8n workflows to github.
Why?
Build expertise with no-code workflow automation tool. Familiarise with GCP, as I’d mainly used AWS previously. Save time on recurring tasks.
Tech
- n8n self-hosted on GCP
- JavsScript for code nodes
NewsChart
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What?
Visualise top news items on a world map. Includes comparison of different approaches for deciding what is “top”, and AI agent assistance.
Why?
Stay sharp with Java / Spring Boot / ReactJS. Learn some typescript.
Tech
- Java 21 / Spring Boot 4 / React / Typescript