Blog
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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 amica v2, a cheap servo pan/tilt kit with small 9g servos and…
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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 I built a RESTful webserver with websockets, and a javascript-based based…
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Triangulate 3D points from 3D imagepoints from a moving camera
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 point-cloud using consecutive images (of course this will only work if…
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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 I did to make it silent and suitable for the living…
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Semantic segmentation for automotive scenes: ENet
In order to be safe, reliable and fast, autonomous cars need to be able to perceive their environment and react accordingly.
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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 spool holder mounted in the back), and 18cm high, which means…
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Python tips and tricks
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 offers easier kernel-selection, multi-window notebooks, built-in python consoles and some more.…
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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 critical voltage levels are reached to prevent damage to the filesystem…
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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 originally planned on going the easy way and ordered a converter…
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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 Neato XV vacuum-robots. In Germany it is quite hard to get…