I spend my days building great things for other people. This site is where I build for me — the projects, the detours, and the occasional glorious dead end.
For years I've been the person other people call when they need something built. Software that keeps a business running. Demos that win the room. Fixes at 2 a.m. I got very good at building for everyone but myself.
This site is the correction. One domain, all my adventures: music tech, storytelling trails, hardware that fights the heat, tools that sort your trash, and the consulting craft that keeps the lights on. Plus the seasons that came before — virtual worlds, recommendation engines, digital twins.
No personal brand strategy. No thought leadership. Just the honest log of a builder who can't stay in one lane — and stopped apologizing for it.
AI tools for music creators, built with two co-founders who are musicians and technologists alike. Producer Betty is your AI co-producer inside Logic Pro — real-time help with mixing, track organization, and creative sparks — while the wider Betty family handles the career side: shows, setlists, marketing, bookings.
VISIT GIGATON.AI →Place-based storytelling for the centennial of Route 66. A self-guided walking tour through downtown Springfield, Missouri — the birthplace of the Mother Road — where you visit historic locations, earn stamps, and hear the stories the highway left behind.
WALK THE TRAIL →Sorting trash sucks, so I built a scanner for Clear Drop that does the thinking for you. Snap a photo of any item — even a pile of mixed items — and it tells you what it is, which bin it belongs in, whether it's soft plastic ready for Clear Drop's compactor, and where to take the tricky stuff like e-waste. Free, in your browser, no app required.
TRY THE SCANNER →The gallery I've run for NFT collectors for years, freshly brought back to life. Point it at a wallet and it builds The Wall, with every piece organized by collection. It also makes a timeline of when each piece came home, one-click posters, meme mode, and narrated Stories. It shows off collections without ever touching the tokens.
FLEX YOUR WALL →A cosmic matchmaker — and not just for dating. Aurora draws on the many systems built around birthdays and birthplaces, from numerology to the stars, to illuminate the connections between people: friends, collaborators, family, kindred spirits.
MEET AURORA →Wearable cooling for a world that keeps hitting 100°F. A hybrid vest — radiative-cooling shell, swappable phase-change inserts, optional airflow — designed for the people who can't just stay inside.
An instrument for watching randomness. It reads a network of random-event generators built from a Mac’s own physical noise — microphone hiss, the accelerometer, the camera sensor — each calibrated against itself, with a cryptographic control running alongside as a ghost. The whole network’s variance collapses into one glanceable state: scattered blue drift aligning into a single gold band as coherence rises. Runs here in simulation.
OPEN THE FIELD →Software consulting done properly: maintaining and extending the systems real businesses run on. It's the discipline that funds the adventures — and sharpens every one of them.
The adventures pay their own way. Here's what Peter's Grand Adventure sells, and how billing works for each.
A web gallery for NFT collectors. It's free for 150+ curated collections. FlexPass unlocks every collection a wallet holds.
Display only. Collection Flex never mints, sells, trades, or holds NFTs or crypto, and never connects to your wallet.
SEE FLEXPASS →An astrology-powered dating and connection app for adults 18+. Core matching is free. Cosmic adds AI compatibility readings, AI chat, extra charts, and detailed score breakdowns.
Readings are for entertainment and reflection, not prediction.
MEET AURORA →Custom software, websites, and technology consulting for businesses and individuals, from new builds to ongoing maintenance of the systems people run on.
Clients pay for the work I do. When a client's own site takes payments, they run through the client's own payment account.
START A PROJECT →Prices are shown in US dollars (USD) before you pay. Checkout is handled securely by Stripe, so your card details never touch my servers. Everything is digital and unlocks as soon as payment completes, with nothing to ship. Cancel subscriptions anytime, and ask for a full refund within 7 days of any charge.
Peter's Grand Adventure is a sole proprietorship owned and operated by Peter Newell, based in Tacoma, Washington.
Support & billing: petersgrandadventure@gmail.com
The expeditions above are just the latest season. I've spent my whole career chasing the kind of technology Arthur C. Clarke meant — "indistinguishable from magic" — and turning it into things real people actually use.
My first startup — self-funded, bootstrapped, and a great ride. We built incredible things across a whole range of virtual-world platforms, on the frontier of digital realities long before "metaverse" was a buzzword. At the heart of it: music, and connecting people across the world — a thread that runs straight through to Gigaton today.
Built Wayfair's first product recommendation systems — teaching a giant furniture catalog to figure out what you actually want.
Built a sharing-economy platform helping neighbors pool resources and actually act like neighbors.
Explored emerging technologies and cultivated a culture of innovation at the co-op — bringing the bleeding edge to a company built on the outdoors.
Staff software engineer making every building and space more valuable and accessible. Shipped the Autodesk and Procore integrations bringing spatial context to construction, and ran the "Co-pilot Showdown" evaluating AI coding tools — before betting on AI was the obvious move.
Growing the Betty family at Gigaton, teaching a scanner to tell trash from treasure, and designing a vest that fights 100° summers.
The fastest way to explain an idea is to hand someone a working prototype and get out of the way.
Unknown. That's rather the point. Check back — this page changes when I do.
Want to build something, fund something, jam on something, or just compare notes on glorious dead ends? The inbox is open.
SAY HELLO →Questions about a FlexPass or Aurora charge? Same inbox: petersgrandadventure@gmail.com