About EqualMass

The Mission: Engineering Digital Independence

In an era of centralized data harvesting and proprietary "black box" algorithms, this infrastructure serves as a personal laboratory for Technological Sovereignty. As a one-woman army, I have architected a sovereign, open-source ecosystem designed for autonomous resilience and 100% data ownership.

The Founder: Nicole, MSc(E)

I am a Lead Systems & DevOps Architect, Mechatronics Engineer, and former Commercial Pilot (737-NG) based in rural Omagh, Northern Ireland.

My engineering philosophy is a convergence of Mechatronic precision and DevOps pragmatism. I treat systems architecture with a "Flight Deck" mentality: prioritizing high-availability, safety-critical redundancy, and absolute service integrity even during core network degradation.

Infrastructure Core & Orchestration

  • Distributed Orchestration: Managing a fleet of 50+ Docker containers and approximately 15 VMs distributed across a 3-node geographic cluster.
  • Physical Compute: High-availability environment powered by three dedicated physical hosts: services01, services02, and services03.
  • Authoritative DNS: Operating private, authoritative redundant nameservers (ns1 and ns2) to maintain absolute control over the DNS lifecycle and facilitate automated ACME DNS-01 wildcard SSL orchestration.
  • SDN & Private Mesh: A coordinated star-topology 3-gateway cluster maintaining a high-availability (HA) private backbone. Utilizing stateful tunneling with AES-256-CBC encryption and Keepalived/VRRP for stateful L3 failover, the mesh ensures consistent inter-service communication—including Matrix federation and database syncing. The architecture employs TCP MSS clamping to mitigate fragmentation overhead and a private BGP routing layer to manage cross-node path redundancy while maintaining a zero-exposure profile on the public WAN.
  • HA Storage: A multi-site storage strategy utilizing two synced, dedicated NAS nodes (nas01 and nas02) bridged via the VPN backbone. This configuration provides 1Gbps local performance with off-site synchronization for backups and persistent container volumes, ensuring data durability across failure domains.
  • Data Sovereignty: A fully hardened email-collaboration stack ensuring 100% data ownership, protected by enterprise-grade security protocols including MTA-STS, TLSRPT, and a strict DMARC (Reject) policy.

The Git Laboratory: Open-Source Repository

The heartbeat of this project is git.equalmass.com, a private Git instance that serves as the authoritative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) hub for my engineering work and a curated resource for the community.

  • Public Utility & Linux Tooling: Beyond infrastructure, I develop and host several open source, specialized utilities for public use, focusing on Linux desktop and portable packaging:
    • Configuration Management: GnomeSettingsVault (C++/GTK3) and GnomeSettingsTransfer, (Bash) which wrote as a GNOME user, to try addressing the nightmare of transferring and backing up User Profiles in GNOME.
    • AppImage Infrastructure: Custom AppImage builders for Mission Planner and Google Chrome, bridging the gap between complex dependencies and Linux portability. These projects leverage Docker to create standalone AppImages of these applications, favouring their use on a Linux system across multiple distributions.
    • Media Optimization: A standalone ImageRename utility for GNOME, also written in C++/GTK3, to organise a large collection of images.
  • The ArduPilot "Sidecar" Project: As an enthusiast, I’ve developed a specialized sidecar for the ArduPilot Firmware Builder environment. This sidecar application is designed to simplify the injection of custom patches prior to the firmware compiling process.
    • Note: I don’t own or develop ArduPilot—the real wizards behind ArduPilot are the official development team and the Ardupilot Foundation. My focus is strictly on the sidecar automation and streamlining the build process for fellow tinkerers.
    • Optimization: The modified ArduPilot build environment I host is tuned with specific system resource limits and SHM (Shared Memory) allocations to handle performance-critical builds and incorporates the sidecar application I developed. If you ever need to build your ArduPilot Flight Controller firmware and add some custom patches to your build, I am sure this application will simplify your life.

The Physics of the Name: A Relativistic Homage

The name EqualMass is simply a geeky tribute to Albert Einstein and the two foundational identities of modern physics. It reflects a preference for technical sovereignty and a unified approach to engineering.

The Equivalence Principle

Einstein’s "happiest thought" was the realization that Inertial Mass ($m_i$) and Gravitational Mass ($m_g$) are numerically identical.

$$m_i = m_g$$

In physics, this means gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable. In this project, it represents the duality of infrastructure: the "inertia" of a complex system (how it resists change) and the "gravitational pull" of the data it holds. By maintaining total ownership of the stack—from DNS orchestration to the metal—I ensure the center of gravity stays within my own reference frame.

Mass-Energy Equivalence

The most famous equation in history defines the identity between matter and work:

$$E = mc^2$$

It’s a reminder that mass is just "congealed" energy. In a DevOps context, there is no real distinction between the Energy (the code, the automation, and the engineering effort) and the Mass (the resulting infrastructure and hardened binaries). They are different manifestations of the same bloody thing.

Future Trajectories & Collaboration

Sister Projects: I am currently preparing fpvaddict.com and fpvaddict.co.uk as future homes for FPV drone experiments and mechatronic firmware notes.

Call for Fellow Tinkerers: I’m always looking to learn more and would love to hear suggestions or chat with anyone "nerding out"—whether on ArduPilot patches, physics, technology, or FPV tech. If you're a fellow pilot, designer, or builder and wish to lend a hand to this project or simply have a chat, get in touch via my matrix address, I'd love to hear from you!