Projects

Things I’ve built. Some shipped and running, some still in flight, some shelved with reasons. The ones with a live URL are real software you can go look at — self-hosted on hardware I own, not demos that disappear.

Birdfeeder cam

A backyard feeder in Ontario, Canada, watched end-to-end by hardware and software I built and run at home. A camera catches each visitor; a vision pipeline figures out what it is and logs the sighting — with the species and the model’s confidence baked right into the photo. The two most recent are always up top: Common Grackle Northern Cardinal Warming up the feeder log… if nothing appears, the latest visitors are over at birdfeedercam.justinlaviolette.com. ...

Inkling

A drawing-and-guessing game built like chess by mail. You draw a picture and give it a caption, then send it to your pen-pal — who sees only the drawing and has to guess the caption. Then they draw and caption their own and send it back, and you guess theirs. Turn-based and asynchronous, not a frantic real-time race: you play on your own time, and each caption stays hidden until the other person has taken their guess. ...

PaintMatcher

A web app for the paint lab. Measure a target color with an X-Rite spectrophotometer, store it as CIE L*a*b*, and PaintMatcher returns the closest existing recipe — plus an adjustment suggestion when the measured color misses the target. Built on Flask + HTMX + SQLite. Closest-match ranking uses ΔE2000, the industry standard for paint and automotive finish work. Adjustment suggestions come from a linearised least-squares solve over Lab-space shift vectors per base colorant — good for the small tweaks that make up the common case. ...