Julien Vanier

My projects

Here are some interesting projects I've worked on over the years.

• 
  MuniRent

  I'm the CTO & co-founder of MuniRent.

  MuniRent is a website where local governments can rent equipment to each other. I put together the web application in Ruby on Rails, and all the DevOps that goes with hosting a multi-tenant cloud application.

• 
  1000tools

  Prior to working on MuniRent, I was the CTO & co-founder of 1000tools.com

  1000tools.com is a sharing-economy website where people can share tools locally. The 1000tools.com Ruby on Rails application was the basis for MuniRent.

• 
  Send To Car

  I'm the author of Send To Car for Android and Send To Car for iOS

  Send To Car is an app to send address to car navigation systems. It relives from the pain of having to manually enter an address in the aweful car navigation system interface. Instead, just search for an address on your phone and Send To Car will send it to the nav system in your car. More than a dozen brands work, all over the world.

  Send To Car has more than 125,000 downloads, more than official app from brands like BMW and Ford!

  The Android version is free and open soure. The iOS version is $3.99.

  Sadly, this project is now over since Google shut down the old Google Maps website and Send To Car needed that interface.

• 
  Open Sesame

  OpenSesame is the garage door opener app I put together for my house. It's a cool hack that cost me $0 of materials and has served me well for years now.

  The server is in node.js and the physical interface to the garage door opener is hacked through the flow-control pins of a RS232 serial port. There is an Android native client with notifications and an HTML5/WebSocket client.

  The source for the server and the client is on GitHub.

• 
  Engine control

  I developed engine control software for cars like the Pontiac Solstice for 8 years while working at Bosch in the Systems and Advanced Engineering group.

  The most fun projects were the ones where I was given a car and had to make it work by putting together an entire engine management system, including engine computer hardware, embedded control software and wiring harness.

• 
  Coffee machine mods

  I love coffee!

  So when I realized that I could make better coffee by having more consistent water temperature in my espresso machine, I took the machine apart, reverse-engineered the water and AC electric circuits, and hooked up a PID controller, a solid-state relay and a thermocouple to add digital temperature control!

  Everything fit back inside the box when I was done, so my espresso machine doesn't look like a bomb anymore.