On a quiet street, in a modest house in Renfrew, lives a techno wizard whose years of experience and his passion for technology have led him to transform his home into a digital powerhouse to rival the Tardis.

“I’ve met a few people in my life that influenced me” explains Peter Morton. “The first one was Professor Benoit Mandelbrot.  I met him at an air show in the mid-70s where I had gone to meet Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. I was asking them lots of questions and this fellow started talking to me. I didn’t know who he was at the time but he spent a good 20 minutes talking to me. I’ve always been quite creative, and he started talking about using mathematics for art”.

From this chance encounter, Peter began to see a certain artistic beauty in science and grasping abstract concepts. He devoted much of his life to working with technology, designing and creating systems and algorithms of one kind or another. He worked in this industry for many years and at one point combined his passions for science and art into a show.

“In the early to mid-90s I had a performing arts type act. I performed at venues with people like Mark Wahlberg. That was when he was DJ Marky Mark”. Peter supported these performances with video and light effects.

The nature of Peter’s disabilities are varied and complicated but originate from an active lifestyle during his youth (mountaineering and motorcycles to name just a couple hobbies). This resulted in numerous injuries which have led to a deterioration of damaged skeletal structures.

His engineering career started in the 80's with the Kinloch Group as Test and Development Manager before eventually becoming a Procurement Engineer for the HP organisation. In his long career he became very knowledgeable at fixing existing designs and replacing things with microcontrollers.

Back to the present day however, Peter uses Open Source to share coding and algorithms he has written to work with simple technology, a lot of which supports his independence.

His own home now feels the full extent of his technical skill and experience with a range of his own personal adaptations. He has countless gadgets around his house, most of which he either designed, adapted or built from scratch.

These include…

Monitoring temperature & ambience

He has a number of small devices around the house that measure atmospheric pressure, relative humidity and temperature. “I suffer from Neuropathy”, Peter explains. “My body doesn’t get feedback from hot or cold. My feet would be blue before I realised that it was freezing down there. So these provide feedback for me and communicate directly with the heating controls.”

Automated bathroom

Until recently, Peter’s bathroom door opened automatically for him when he approached it and the lights still turn on without him having to flick a switch. “What I did was I used an ultra sound PIR. I design it and my nephew helps me build it”. Running on a simple electric motor, the sliding door would gently fall back when the sensors were activated. They are also programmed not to register anyone below a certain height, to prevent Peter’s dogs constantly triggering the system. There is a problem with the door itself he explains, which is why it’s currently not in use. The lights in the bathroom are activated in a similar no-contact kind of way.

“On the shower I have a hydro-electric generator”, he goes on to explain further. “So when you run the shower, it generates electricity”. This helps provide some of the energy for his home, reducing the cost of his bills.

On his wheelchair

Peter has done some very smooth tweaks to the back of his wheelchair to improve both his safety and that of his two dogs when he goes out to walk them. The main difference being that he has installed a series of lights (red, blue and white) that light up in slow succession. “If you approach a car that is parked on the pavement and you need to go out onto the road and drive around that car; it’s behind you that you are vulnerable. And it happens a lot.” The choice of colours is not incidental either. Himself a driver, Peter is well aware that whilst people’s attention drifts whilst they’re at the wheel, drivers react instinctively to brake lights (red) up ahead or emergency services (blue).

Peter’s also got a thin triangular frame, with similar lights, which he can fix to the back of his chair for further visibility, especially when in a crowded space like a shopping mall. “It makes people notice you. They maybe have a laugh at me but I don’t care. The point is no-one’s falling over me anymore”.

Other gadgets and gizmos

“When you’re disabled, things have to be easy to manoeuvre. I don’t know how many mobile phones I broke trying to charge them. I actually now have a pad inside my phone, which when I sit my phone down in that wee white circle, it charges my phone”. He’s referring of course to a wireless phone charger which sits on a little table in his bedroom. The device has had one or two alterations made.

Peter has good days and bad days with his health, which can affect the extent of his creativity. However insomnia also means he has a lot of hours to kill and he is constantly working on new ideas or perfecting older ones. Whilst we were chatting he shows me further tech he’s working on like his very own fall detector that can send an alert to his nephew who lives only a short distance away. Elsewhere when you look around his home, mysterious lights flash on futuristic looking devices, the purpose of which I can only hazard a guess at. Visibly amused by my look of awe, Peter is only too glad to share his knowledge and passion for technology.

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