About

Detecting Systems is a personal research and build project by James Belcher — a long-running effort to turn metal detecting into a systematic, robot-driven search rather than a hand-swung one.

What you’ll find here

• Projects — the hardware and software pieces: the rover platform, the modular metal detector, the MDRobot base.
• Blog — the archive from the original fixstuff-thots blog (2012–2024), plus ongoing notes on the current rebuild.

Why the rebuild

The early robot was a proving ground — it confirmed that the chassis, the PLC control stack, and the detector coil array could actually work together in a field. The current generation is about making it repeatable, portable, and wearable: a backpack-based detector you can run solo, a rover that can run the same detector autonomously over larger grids, and unified logging across both.

Contact

GitHub: github.com/fixstuff