Small tech, not big tech.

I’m Michael, a designer and general techie based near Totnes, making bespoke bits of tech for local people and small teams. Websites and apps you actually own rather than rent, automation for your home or business, interesting technical projects.

Tell me about your project See the work

What I help with

Apps and websites

Build your own site or app, with professional guidance

Vibe code your own thing, with occasional support from me. Skip the Squarespace/Wix route, build something that’s actually yours, at cost, the way the pros do it.

Home energy and automation

Give your home a brain

Using Home Assistant to control your battery, heat pump, and car charging. Understanding your home’s heat loss profile, and what’s actually worth fixing first. The same setup covers the network side: your own DNS for ad blocking.

Bespoke tech and automation

Software and hardware, built for the job

Sometimes the thing you need does not exist, or exists badly. I build it: software, hardware, sensors and automation, or all three talking to each other. Usually for business, social or creative projects, where the off-the-shelf option would mean changing how you work to suit the tool.

Recent work

Meadowbrook

A community facility’s entire digital setup, sorted

Website and branding, social media strategy, a smart lock and booking system, using charity status to get Google Workspace for Business, modern working practices (shared inboxes, calendars, drive), and volunteer co-ordination.

Website and branding, built to be handed over rather than rented
Smart lock and online booking, replacing texts to one person’s phone
Google Workspace for Business, free on charity status
Shared inboxes, calendars and drive, so nothing lives on one laptop
Volunteer co-ordination, so the jobs that keep it running get picked up

Charity Branding Booking

meadowbrookdartington.org

The Dartmoor Tors website, showing the app icon beside a phone displaying the tors map with bagged summits pinned across Dartmoor

Dartmoor tors app

The app I wish existed

A tors-mapping app for Dartmoor, built because nothing like it existed. Now other people use it too.

iOS Maps Dartmoor

dartmoortors.com

A Home Assistant dashboard in a browser window, showing kitchen and living room temperature charts against target temperatures, heat pump flow and return, and an energy tariff view

Home automation

Making a home as green as it can be

Connecting a heat pump to grid data, tracking energy use around the home, and working out where to focus energy-conservation effort, down to specifying the right battery size.

Home Assistant Heat pump Battery

An ADS-B receiver dashboard in a browser window, showing charts of aircraft seen and tracked, tracks per hour, receiver range in nautical miles, and signal level

ADS-B, BirdNET-Pi and bat monitoring

Listening to what’s overhead

Repurposing old hardware for monitoring bird and bat migration, feeding community projects to understand the world around us.

ADS-B BirdNET-Pi Bats

About

Michael, in glasses, rendered as a black and white halftone portrait

Working in tech since 2008: agencies, led the redesign of TfL’s website early on, led large teams in corporates, worked across design, development, and product management. Now runs a sideline applying that experience to interesting technology projects, and to local people who need something built or fixed.

Why “fluvial”

It means “of a river”. I live on the Dart, and it felt right. Rivers shape themselves to the land rather than the other way round; that’s the approach I try to bring to a project too.

Have a project in mind?

Let me know. Interesting challenges and collaborating with people are the whole point.

hello@fluvial.studio

Usually a reply within a day or two. Based between Totnes and Dartington, working across the South Hams: Ashburton, Buckfastleigh, Newton Abbot and Kingsbridge.