Richard Brown is the CTO and founder of Sensa Systems Ltd, the UK company behind Sensa Nomad, Sensa Radar and Sensa Studio. He writes the Workshop articles and the rated device reviews on this site.
Background
Richard spent nearly four decades in corporate IT. The last ten of those were as a Platform Engineering lead, building and running the infrastructure platforms that development teams depend on. That work is where the design principles behind Sensa come from: open foundations, no single-sourced components, and systems that are boring and predictable when it matters.
At the end of 2024 he left that career to convert a campervan and travel. The conversion is what turned into a company. Every subsystem in the van, heating, power, lighting, water and security, came with its own app, its own panel and its own remote, and none of them spoke to each other. Nothing on the market solved it. So he built the thing that did.
That van is BlackPaw, and it is still the vehicle every Sensa release is tested on before it reaches a customer.
What he writes about
The articles on this site are written from a real conversion rather than from a specification sheet. That includes the parts that did not work: hardware that failed, approaches that were abandoned, and devices that are still marked “awaiting rating” because they have not been lived with long enough to have an opinion worth publishing.
Areas covered:
- Home Assistant in vehicles, including installation, configuration and the limits of it
- Campervan and motorhome electrical systems, power budgeting and 12V design
- Data networking in vehicles, including Power over Ethernet
- Device reviews based on use in a working vehicle, not bench testing
- Marine control systems, ahead of Sensa Helm
Elsewhere
- Sensa on YouTube
- Release notes on the Sensa documentation site
Contact
For questions about a build, a product or the trade programme, use the contact page or email [email protected]. Support comes from the people who built the system.
Sensa Systems Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 16958196.