Projects & Blog on Will Furnell

Detecting incident angles of radioactive particles with the Timepix 3 detector

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My University final year project was “Detecting incident angles of radioactive particles with the Timepix 3 detector”, as I had experience with using Timepix detectors for a few years by then, and I thought this could be a useful project for future research in this area.

The project overall had a negative outcome - I was not able to determine incident angles with a single detector. You can download the full report here.

German Infrastructure Trip

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2025, thanks to some of my own research and the Infrastructure Club Travel Guide I decided to go on an infrastructure tour of the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany!

I chose this area as it’s pretty easy to get to by train from the UK - and it has some amazing places that have been preserved that you can’t find here. Plus, the D-Ticket is such amazing value and meant I could travel around very cheaply.

Dallas Pedestrian Tunnel Network

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you like liminal spaces, then the Dallas Pedestrian Network is for you. I visited in 2022, and have finally (!) written up this short post showing it off!

It’s wild! It definitely looks like in some places it’s on its last legs - places are not maintained very well or at all.

Some of the network is actually above ground, and I did not realise this initially when I visited. The underground sections felt more neglected than the above ground ones.

Custom controller for Hannover flipdot displays

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I, and others, have been working on a replacement controller for Hannover flipdot displays.

I haven’t had much success at getting the newer version (with Ethernet support) to work yet - but wanted to document that this work is taking place.

However, the old version, based on damow’s work does work well! And has been working well for years.

Jubilee Line Door Button modification - custom PCB

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

During the event a few years ago I had some spare time so bought some Jubilee Line door buttons from the London Transport Museum online vintage shop. At the time they were very good value and sold unrefurbished.

I wanted to use one to control the Hue bulb in my bedroom, but as the built in circuitry wasn’t suitable I designed my own.

Okay, not so much design, moreso completely overengineer.

Launching a Pico Balloon!

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few months I’ve been working on building a pico balloon payload for the university society I’ve been president of, TinkerSoc.

This has been my first foray into designing PCBs and writing code for (just) the ATMega328PU, so it’s taken a little while! For communications, I decided LoRa (the 433MHz version, and not to be confused with LoRaWAN - this is raw LoRa) would be the best choice - it’s in the licence free ISM band, modules are relatively cheap and it has great range. For processing the ATMega328PU was chosen simply because I have experience with the Arduino ecosystem. For temperature, the LM75B was chosen - again because I have experience with it. And the serial Ublox NEO6M GPS modules, which are very easy to find cheaply on Aliexpress were chosen simply because of their price.

SCSI2SD - an easier way

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I got a SCSI2SD v5 board the other day for a Macintosh Quadra 700 as the original hard drive had finally died.

Unfortunately this machine (at the moment) has basically no I/O - the floppy drive is not functioning properly and I do have a SCSI CD drive, but not SCSI1.

So… I needed a way to install Mac OS 8 without using the floppy or CD drive.

I decided to use the SD card as both the HDD and the installation media. To start with I hooked up the blank SD card to my modern computer, downloaded a Mac OS 8.1 ISO (https://winworldpc.com/download/7724D496-62C2-11E6-977E-525400B25447) and wrote the ISO to the SD card, like I’ve done before with USB sticks. eg diskutil list # to get SD card identifier dd if=MacOS8_1.iso of=/dev/[SD card disk identifier]

TAPAS

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

TAPAS is the Timepix Analysis Platform at School and is a web platform I’ve been developing over the last couple of years for analysing radiation data from CERN’s Timepix detectors.

I originally developed it for my Extended Project Qualification but now have extended it massively.

TAPAS is now used by many schools and organisations around the country - and is ready for over 300 schools and their students to analyse scientific data. TAPAS will also be the home to data from the LUCID payload on TechDemoSat-1 that is currently in orbit.

Developing for GridPP - grid-analysis

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Since getting access to the UK Grid, I’ve been starting to write some of my own software to run on it. Initially, I have been working on a simple analysis system, using lucid-utils for actual analysis, to run through a folder of XYC frames and output a CSV file that is similar to that of what TAPAS (https://starserver.thelangton.org.uk/tapas) produces - but designed for a much larger scale.

The system uses Ganga to easily submit jobs to the GridPP DIRAC instance, requiring you to only enter a ZIP path and a couple of other options. You can even submit a job with a ‘one-liner’ really easily! The analysis software is avaliable on CVMFS at the following path: /cvmfs/researchinschools.egi.eu/software/grid-analysis It can also be found on Github: https://github.com/willfurnell/grid-analysis