What I'm Doing, What I Did, What's Next

Doing right now: the Canadian Defence Hardware Program

My bench is full: most of the eleven builds are already built and the rest are nearly finished. I read Canada's public defence calls, the Defence Drone Initiative (launched July 2026) and the Army's MINERVA challenges, as free requirements documents, and I'm building against them at hobby scale, every step documented:

• Sky: Passive Aerial Early-Warning Node, receive-only passive radar on a KrakenSDR, scored against an ADS-B ground-truth receiver.
• Water: Passive Acoustic Vessel Monitor, solar hydrophone node classifying vessels, with AIS ground truth.
• Ground: Seismic & Acoustic Perimeter Mesh, solar ESP32 LoRa nodes telling vehicles from footsteps at the edge.
• GPS-Denied Navigation Rover + Convoy Robots on a Degraded Mesh, ROS 2 EKF navigation with the GNSS cut, and convoys that survive bad links.
• Thermal Search-and-Rescue Drone + Passive Acoustic Drone Detector, the MINERVA Arctic ISR gap and the NRC/DRDC passive counter-drone idea, at hobby scale.
• Cold-Soak Battery Rig + Secure Robot-Fleet Updates, cold-weather battery data and supply-chain integrity, the two pain points the Army names outright.

Full parts lists, prices, and build guides: Canadian Defence Hardware Program hub.

Doing: six software defence builds, written up as they progress

• Arctic Domain Awareness Digital Twin, fusing ADS-B, AIS, and Sentinel-1 radar over the North; dark-vessel and route-deviation alerts.
• DDIL-Proof DevOps, CI/CD and telemetry that survive denied, degraded, intermittent links; store-and-forward to k3s edge nodes.
• Counter-Drone Sensor Fusion Simulator, synthetic radar/RF/acoustic/camera tracks, Kalman fusion, human-in-the-loop triage. Defensive simulation only.
• Decision Black Box, tamper-evident, hash-chained audit log with replay and OPA policy checks.
• Zero-Trust Air-Gapped Supply Chain, SBOM, sigstore signing, and reproducible builds across a simulated one-way transfer.
• Operation LENTUS-Style Drone Mapping, simulated disaster-response flights with edge computer vision and a live situational-awareness map.

Doing: six build guides for Canada's 2027 defence calls

Canada now publishes its needs as measurable specs, so I wrote six build guides that treat those specs as requirements documents. Each guide has an architecture, tiered build steps (simulation, bench, field), metrics to publish, and an honest spec-gap table that says exactly what a hobby-scale build proves and what it does not:

• Arctic ISR Drone, heated battery bay with cold-test data, thermal person/vehicle detection measured in pixels-on-target, detections georeferenced into TAK, and a glove-operable control kit, against the MINERVA Arctic UAS spec.
• GPS-Denied Cargo Ground Vehicle for Snow, ROS 2 EKF navigation with LiDAR-inertial odometry, a snow-noise filter, wheel-slip detection, and a payload sweep, against the MINERVA cargo and surveillance ground specs.
• Autonomous Seabed-Survey Boat, lawnmower survey lines with a single-beam echosounder, gridded seabed models, and anomaly detection scored against planted targets, the survey-and-detect core of the mine-countermeasures vessel call.
• Counter-Drone Test-and-Scoring Harness, SAPIENT interfaces on sensor nodes, a Cursor on Target bridge to TAK, scenario cards mirroring the IDEaS sandbox, Stone Soup metrics, and a coverage planner.
• Secure Autonomy for the Fleet, MAVLink 2 signing, WireGuard link encryption, signed ArduPilot firmware, SROS2 enclaves, and a pymavlink intrusion detector, attacked and fixed in my own lab.
• Sovereign AI and Data Enclave, Keycloak identity, OPA policy, OpenTDF data protection, OpenBao key custody with an HSM, and pgvector retrieval with row-level security, tested for zero cross-label leaks.

What I did

• As Incident Manager for Shield Security Systems at the CN Tower, cut SOC alert MTTR by 25% and automated 30+ daily security alerts: mapped the triage workflow across Splunk and AlienVault, found 3 bottlenecks, shipped enrichment pipelines and Python and Splunk SPL correlation, added human-in-the-loop checkpoints for high-severity alerts, and wrote runbooks for junior analysts.
• Built a 7-node Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox hosts with VLAN segmentation, Calico, MetalLB, Longhorn, and Prometheus + Grafana, all on consumer hardware.
• Built a zero-trust Proxmox cloud behind Cloudflare Tunnel with Tailscale fallback and automated 30-day ZFS snapshot retention, no public IP exposure.
• Wrote and published 116 hands-on labs across nine tracks, each with real commands, diagrams, expected outputs, and validation checks.
• Kept healthcare systems at 99%+ uptime at CardiOCare with a VLAN-segmented network and documented data flows for compliance.
• Earned 25+ certifications across Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, and OPSWAT while working and studying full-time.

Next

• Publish the cold-soak dataset, runtime, voltage sag, and failure mode vs temperature.
• Stand up 2-3 passive radar nodes and fuse their outputs.
• Roll signed OTA updates across the rover fleet, validated in the cold chamber.
• Tie every node into the Multi-Domain Common Operating Picture and chaos-test it by cutting links and killing nodes.
• Incorporate a Canadian entity and work through the business-readiness checklist (Controlled Goods, CPCSC Level 1 self-assessment, supplier cyber certification) so the six build guides can become real IDEaS and Innovative Solutions Canada submissions.