N.B. Indie Builds: Power Meters, Trading Cards and a Fire Map

Not every good piece of New Brunswick software comes from a funded startup. These projects were built by individual developers who had a problem, wrote the tool and shipped it.

NB Power and Moncton water usage on your home dashboard

Home Assistant is popular open-source software for running a smart home on your own hardware. Its Energy dashboard shows how much power and water a home uses, hour by hour. Two new add-ons from a developer who publishes as dnlbck bring New Brunswick utility accounts into it.

NB Power for Home Assistant pulls electricity use from NB Power's MyAccount portal. It imports about three years of billing history by day, then the last year hour by hour, with energy and cost for each hour. It also shows month-to-date use and a projected bill. The developer credits the earlier nbpower-ha project with working out how the portal's usage graphs get their data. Moncton Water for Home Assistant does the same for the City of Moncton's water portal. It adds about three years of billed history and, for the last two years, hourly smart-meter readings to the dashboard's water section. It reached version 0.4.2 on October 6.

Know this before you install either one. Both are unofficial: neither NB Power nor the City of Moncton publishes an API, and neither made these tools. Each add-on signs in with your own portal username and password, the same way a browser does. The developer publishes under a handle. We are describing the projects, not recommending them; read the code and decide for yourself. Both are MIT-licensed.

Nic Richard's Saint John builds

Nic Richard graduated from UNB Saint John in 2026 with a computer science degree. He has several live products, each with its own site, listed on his portfolio.

• Miscellary turns collections into trading cards. You design and publish a set of cards about anything: plants, rocks, film cameras, consoles. Other people open a free pack per set each day, recycle duplicates into points for more packs, and trade for the cards they are missing. It runs on the web and on Android. The site lists 18 sets so far, from film cameras to woodland fungi. Its README says the focus is "creativity and discovery rather than financial ownership or artificial scarcity."
• WikiRacr is a competitive version of wikiracing: get from one Wikipedia article to another by clicking links. It began as Richard's research into graph search. Searching outward from both articles at once made route-finding fast enough to hand-pick large numbers of start and goal pairs. It now has solo play, a daily challenge and multiplayer modes including Ranked, Speedrun and Knockout.
• TraceTray is analytics for websites. It turns cursor movement, clicks, scrolling and pauses into visitor groups and recommendations. It uses no cookies and no session recordings.

He has also built Portlore, a guide for cruise passengers that suggests what to see near each port in the time they have ashore. And his first paid commission was a desktop and Android app for a seed germination researcher: it places seeds in petri dishes at random, so no position gets favoured by accident, and gives each layout a code that reproduces it exactly.

NB Fire Map

NB Fire Map puts the province's wildfire picture on a single interactive map. The open-source project combines:

• active fire points from the Government of New Brunswick's GeoNB service
• wildfire perimeters, fire danger and fire weather data from Natural Resources Canada
• MODIS and VIIRS satellite hotspots from NASA FIRMS
• NOAA smoke forecasts and air quality readings
• recent Sentinel-2 satellite imagery
• live aircraft positions from the OpenSky Network, which sometimes include water bombers

A "Near Fires" list shows how far each community is from active fires. The project dates to November 2025, and its data is refreshed automatically. Its maintainer publishes under the handle jtgis. The map gathers official open data, and the README notes that the data belongs to its owners. For official fire watch and burn restrictions, the province's fire watch page is the authority.

DeMark, from Miramichi

Marvin Palencia, a Python and web developer in Miramichi (portfolio), builds DeMark. It is booking software and a website in one package for small businesses: appointments, client records, reminders, quotes, invoices and payments. Plans are $49 a month for bookings, client records and email reminders, or $99 a month for the complete package, with data hosted in Canada. There is a seven-day free trial, and a beta offering three months free, with no card, is open until November 16. Custom website projects start at $900. Palencia has also published more than 80 small open-source tools on GitHub, such as a Canadian invoice generator that applies GST, HST, PST or QST by province, a Canadian business-number checker, and accessibility checks for websites and PDFs.

Know a New Brunswick side project that deserves a look? Send us a tip.

Sources

• dnlbck/ha-nbpower: unofficial NB Power integration; MyAccount sign-in with the customer's credentials; about three years of daily history and a year of hourly energy and cost; projected bill; credits nbpower-ha; MIT
• dnlbck/ha-monctonwater: unofficial Moncton water integration; MyAccount sign-in; billed history and hourly smart-meter data; v0.4.2 released October 6, 2026; MIT
• Nic Richard portfolio and LinkedIn (linked from the portfolio): UNB Saint John 2026 graduate; Miscellary, WikiRacr, TraceTray, Portlore and seed placement app descriptions
• Miscellary and its README: trading-card sets, daily packs, duplicate recycling, trading, web and Android, 18 listed sets
• WikiRacr and TraceTray: live products
• NB Fire Map and jtgis/nbfiremap: data layers, sources and ownership notes; created November 2025
• DeMark: booking and website product, pricing, free trial, beta deadline, custom websites from $900, Canadian hosting
• Marvin Palencia, his LinkedIn (linked from his portfolio) and his GitHub: Python and web developer, Miramichi; 86 public repositories, including invoice-pdf-canada, ca-business-number, a11y-audit and pdf-a11y-check