Coenraad Pretorius

about me
From an early age I have always been fascinated by computers and technology. My programming journey started with our first PC, an XP 286 running MS DOS, and a book I still have to this day, Supercharging MS DOS. I spent hours creating small programs with GUIs – extremely time consuming at the time. I like to tinker, so it was inevitable that I would at some point break the PC, by trying to add an 8-bit cartridge to it. Well, nothing a new motherboard could not fix.


Later at university, I started playing around with microcontrollers. Not the nice ones available today, those that still had to be programmed in assembly. It took me a week of late nights just to get a simple LED to flash! Today I have sensors measuring all kind of things for many different applications that can be at least quickly programmed in C++.
I am an Electrical Engineer by day focussing on control technologies and support in the mining industry. In my spare time I facilitate training on Energy Management Systems from time to time and develop software applications. Most of these activities includes measuring energy performance improvement, data analytics and data engineering. I enjoy integrating all the components into one symbiotic system. I like to have a practical application when learning something to get real benefits from my new skills.

In my spare time I enjoy reading, mostly non-fiction business and self-help books but I do enjoy the occasional fiction book. I like being in nature and visiting unfamiliar places. I find relaxation in drawing and photography and love to switch off by going mountain biking.

projects
I have listed some projects below that I have been or currently working on.
- Internet of Things
- Built and integrated sensors and microcontrollers
- Built data collection platform
- Built IoT front-end app
- Data Science
- General statistical analysis
- Determining energy performance
- Anomaly detection
- Data Engineering
- Data pipelines from device-2-cloud
- Programming
- Automation tools (local and cloud)
- General apps to improve my day-to-day
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