About Steven Smethurst
Hi 👋🏼 I'm Steven Smethurst, and I live two lives. By day I'm a CTO at Chipkin Automation Systems, teaching stubborn machines to talk to each other. By night I'm a Artist, Maker, Hacker, and all-around tinkerer who can't leave a good idea alone.
When I'm not beep-booping at the day job, you might find me 🌳 visiting every park in Vancouver, making a deck of cards with birds photos, PCB design, papercraft, Stained Glass, Maps, Board Games,Segment Displays, Lasers and kaleidoscopes, and basically anything that glows. See what I'm currently working on.
I've been keeping a blog since 2001, and I post works-in-progress over on Instagram. Come say hi!
Featured projects
(2026) Daily Fish
An e-paper panel that generates and draws a new fish, or an insect, every day on the ESP32-C3 inside it.
(2026) Project Sunset
A five-year time-lapse of the sunset over Vancouver, one frame every five minutes from a window in Burnaby, starting on the 2026 winter solstice.
(2026) LLM Magic 8 Ball
A Magic 8 Ball with a tiny LLM living inside it, writing your fortune from scratch
From the blog
Project Sunset - the pilot, work in progress
Ten days into the pilot of a five-year sunset time-lapse: exposure tests, a camera that can't see June, power trouble, reflections and a second camera.
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Mixxtape - the first boards, and what went wrong
The first 20 Mixxtape boards arrived from JLCPCB. One boots, the voltage regulator overheats, and there is a list of changes for version two.
Read postTokyo Metro PCB - 248 stations, work in progress
A 320 × 280 mm PCB map of the Tokyo subway with one RGB LED for each of its 248 stations, part way through routing
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