Index of case files

Cases

15 engineering case files. Each one: a real problem, the system that fixed it, and the numbers that prove it.

PCB Manufacturing

PCB Pre-Production Tools

Before an assembly job can be quoted or run, customer BOMs must be cross-checked against pick-and-place files — mismatched designators, missing placements and format quirks are caught by eye, and they cause line stops when missed. Reviewing the Gerber data itself means switching between separate viewers with no link back to the BOM.

UK Construction

Timber Frame Configurator

Designing even a small timber outbuilding to UK standards means juggling TRADA span tables, Approved Document U-value targets and permitted-development height limits across separate references, then producing cut lists and drawings by hand. Errors surface on site, where they are expensive.

Developer Tooling

Terminal UI Platform

Terminal dashboards and ops tools normally mean a pile of TUI library dependencies, each with its own theming, input model and licence. There was no single C# platform for building retro-terminal tools that could also ship each tool as its own standalone binary.

Trading Card Games

TCG Deck Engine

Deck builders use a different tool for every card game, and each game has different construction rules — deck sizes, copy limits, colour identity, leaders and bases. Nothing lets you physically lay cards out the way you would on a table.

Canvas Data Grid

DOM-rendered Blazor grids slow down as rows and features stack up, and the commercial alternatives (AG Grid, Syncfusion, Telerik) are licensed dependencies you don't control. Most teams accept the licence cost because building a serious grid is considered too expensive.

Worldbuilding Platforms

LoreBench

Large fictional settings outgrow wikis fast — locations, factions, timelines and stats drift out of sync because nothing links a city to its planet, its history and the people in it. Writers and GMs end up maintaining consistency by memory.

Dungeon Map Builder

Dungeon map tools output static 2D sprites — no geometry, no real light — so a GM who wants a torch to actually cast shadows has nothing between Dungeondraft and a full game engine. Lighting in existing VTTs is faked with 2D shadow polygons.

IoT / Animal Welfare

Reptile Welfare Monitor

Reptile keepers rely on spot-checking dial thermometers; a failed heat source or drifting probe can go unnoticed for hours, and there is no long-term record to show a vet. Off-the-shelf systems assume one enclosure and put software in charge of heating.

Game Companion Tools

ARK Breeding Planner

ARK breeders chase top-stat, custom-coloured creatures through dozens of pairings, juggling spreadsheets to track which parent carries which stat and mutation. The game itself never shows the wild/mutation/domestic level breakdown that breeding decisions depend on — and a tribe of players needs to coordinate around one shared stock.

Audio Analysis Toolkit

Music-reactive applications need dependable beat and energy data from arbitrary tracks, but full transcription of mixed polyphonic audio is beyond what FFT peak-picking can honestly deliver. Most hobby tools blur that line and ship unreliable note data.

Collection Tracking

Living Pokédex Tracker

Completing a living dex means tracking caught, shiny and hidden-ability status for over 1,000 species — per save, per region — and spreadsheets collapse under that. Most trackers are single-user and re-fetch the same API data endlessly.

Simulation / Play

Modular Toy Sandbox

Virtual-pet and sandbox toys are either scripted set-pieces or full game engines; there's little in between where a player just pushes blocks together and watches behaviour emerge. Hard-coding every pairwise interaction is what kills these projects.

Game Assets / 3D Printing

Browser 3D Modeler

Making a game asset means either Blender — powerful, but a menu labyrinth that punishes anyone who isn't a full-time modeller — or a CAD package priced and shaped for engineering. Neither records how a part actually moves: a cannon that tilts on an axle is, to the tool, just triangles. And print-bound models need millimetre truth that polygon modellers never enforce.

Multiplayer / Simulation

Shared 3D Table

Online tabletop tools make you choose: a rules-enforced implementation of one specific game, or a virtual tabletop where everything is a flat sprite you slide around. Neither lets a group just sit at a table and mess with objects. And when physics runs on each client, everyone's dice land differently — so most tools fake the throw rather than simulate it.

Community Tooling

Discord Server Manager

Running a curated Discord server means authoring inside Discord's own chat box. Long rules or guide posts hit the 2,000-character limit and get split by hand; editing one means deleting and reposting, which loses the pin and scrambles the order; and channel structure is built by right-clicking one channel at a time with permission overwrites set from memory.

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