Luke McCarter · Toronto

philomathis …a lover of learning

φίλος μανθάνειν

Twenty years in heavy industry, a violin and a drum kit, a pen full of dots, and a workbench of half-finished watches. This is the sentence I keep adding to.

About

The short version

Twenty years building maintenance operations for industrial processing and manufacturing. My professional life is CMMS implementation, predictive maintenance, environmental compliance, and building data pipelines to help make the invisible parts of operations visible. The rest of my life is below.

The creative

Lifelong violinist and drummer, playing in Oakville Symphony and indie-rock bands. Listening habits run from Mozart to Meshuggah, Grappelli to Gojira, Brahms to Beastie Boys. Stipple artist and VW tuning enthusiast. Custom watchmaker creating full builds from sourced movements, cases, and hand-painted dials. Trained audio engineer with a project studio. The thread connecting all of it is curiosity: how things work, and how far the tools within reach can take you.

The technical

Self-taught technologist since my first DOS command on a Commodore 64. Built Geocities sites in HTML before Google existed. Decades of hands-on experience across personal, business, and creative software categories. Now building AI-assisted tools, industrial IoT pipelines, and workflow automation for heavy industry. Still just as curious about what the next command does. Active member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Sketchbook

Made, played, driven, drawn.

Stipple and ink, watches off the bench, guitars, cars, and bands mid-set. Mixed on purpose, newest first within each, and it keeps growing.

hover to pause · click to look closer@dotmatrixwatch on Instagram
Projects click a card for the long version

Things I'm working on

open →

Diagnostic Assistant

In progress

An AI coach that walks technicians through faults on niche industrial equipment, citing the service manual as it goes.

RAG over service manuals · multi-turn UI · image analysis · guided decision trees
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Scrap Metal ID

Deployed

Point a phone at the pile and get the grade. Trained on 15,000+ images; the yard's own corrections retrain it.

Nyckel image classification · on-device inference · continuous learning · ferrous + non-ferrous taxonomy
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VRespite

Parked

VR sensory rooms for students who need a fast exit from overload, and immersive experiences for palliative care. Parked, not forgotten.

360° video production · purpose-built VR environments · clinical + educational deployment
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Executive Assistant lanes

Deployed

Scheduled automation lanes that read a working inbox (mail, PDFs, quotes, meeting notes) and write back briefs, summaries and registers, four times a day, with a health-and-spend lane watching the rest.

n8n · model gateway · Drive as the state store · OCR for scanned PDFs · Telegram + Gmail alerts · one shared error handler
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Priority Pulse

Local-first
Daily triage · 2026-03-08 · 9/9 sources
Active7h 12m
Switches412
Fragmentation94/100
ModeReactive
Deep work2 blocks
Best focus38m
Email
2h 34m CMMS
1h 07m Vendors
52m Fleet
41m Enviro
28m

A local-first daily triage for a high-interrupt role. Screen activity, calendar, email and the CMMS go in; one honest read-out lands in Obsidian, and the note you edit there is the note it reads back tomorrow.

The sample on the left is a real day's output: where the time went, what was dropped, and what to protect tomorrow. No cloud, no telemetry.

Python · Claude API · OAuth 2.0 multi-source ingestion · Obsidian as the two-way interface · scheduler + watchdog · local-first
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