Cats and Lasers

I finally am a full member of the internet – I am the proud servant of two cats! To keep them entertained when me and my wife are at work, I built a web-controlled laser-turret: At its heart is an ESP2866 on an nodemcu...

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Control a RaspberryPi Robot using Python and a mobile browser

Usually I use some physical buttons or joystick attached to my electronics in order to quickly test or control components like motors, relais or LEDs. I was searching for a better way, but could not really find one. In this article, I describe how...

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Triangulate 3D points

Given two image-points from two different positions of a camera, we want to calculate the 3D coordinate that this point is located at in the world. This is highly related to Structure from Motion (sfm) approaches, where we try to create a dense 3d...

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CR-10S – The beast from the far east

This printer is a beast indeed. It features a build-volume of 30x30x40cm, looks cool, feels sturdy, and produces really good prints! However, it is pretty loud out of the box, which drastically reduces the WAF (wife acceptance factor). Below I will describe the modifications...

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Semantic segmentation: ENet

In order to be safe, reliable and fast, autonomous cars need to be able to perceive their environment and react accordingly. One of my key interests is in camera sensors and computer vision, so today I tested a semantic segmentation method that is based...

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Fabrikator Mini v2

My robot is in desperate needs of new parts, so I ordered the Fabrikator Mini v2 from Hobbyking (below 200 EUR with shipping). It has a 10x10x10cm build volume and a sturdy metal frame while it’s only 17cm wide, 18.5cm deep (28cm with the...

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Python tips and tricks

  • in Short
  • posted September 30, 2017

Introducing jupyter-lab Vim is all fun and games, but for interactivity, storytelling and presenting, or just interactive prototyping, nothing beets jupyter notebooks. Some fine guys have taken it one step further and introduced jupyter lab, which is a wrapper around our beloved notebooks. It...

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Measuring voltage on a Raspberry Pi and displaying it in style

After I completed the circuitry to power my raspberry pi from a battery pack, I wanted a way to display the voltage of the battery pack, and be able to access the voltage level from the raspberry pi, so it can shutdown automatically when...

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Powering a raspberry pi from battery

The raspberry pi will be the main processing unit of my pypibot. I want to power 6v-motors, so I decided on going with a 7.2v battery-pack. I had one lying around with 2600mAh, which should be enough for testing the setup right now. I...

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Neato XV Laser scanner (LIDAR)

So today my Neat XV LIDAR module arrived, and I had to test it directly with the Raspberry Pi. For everyone that does not know this wonderful piece of hardware yet: It is a low-cost 360-degree spinning laserscanner that is usually scavenged from the...

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Camera2Probe

This has been a weekend-project but turned out to be useful to a lot of people (over 50,000 Downloads until today). I needed to know which capabilities the camera-pipeline in my cellphone supports.

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Short: Schema diagram from an existing sqlite database

  • in Short
  • posted January 23, 2017

I have a sqlite-database which is just a little too big to keep in my head, so I was searching for a way to create a nice diagram from the existing schema. I have been trying a lot of tools, none of them delivered....

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Simulating robots with MORSE

It is quite challenging and costly to build up a robot lab, especially if you just want to conduct some experiments with sensors and a moving platform. In todays search of affordable robot platforms, I discovered MORSE, a simulation platform built on the blender...

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[Kaggle] Minority Report, or the San Francisco Random Forest Precog

I had a little free time on my hand and decided to quickly complete the coursera-course “Data Science at Scale – Practical predictive analytics” of the University of Washington by Bill Howe. The last assignment was to participate in a kaggle competition. For this...

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Smarter smartmirror

So I also decided to build myself a smartmirror. However, I want it to provide a little more functionality than just displaying some information and telling me that I’m beautiful. Here is the finished build: And here is a video of the leap-motion-control in...

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Groundtruth data for Computer Vision with Blender

In the video below you can see the sequence of a car driving in a city scene and braking. The layers I rendered out for groundtruth data are the rendered image with the boundingbox of the car (top left), the emission layer ( shows...

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