Mountain View

Point and Snap for my smart home

Having smart devices in your home is fun, but turning them off is still a hassle. Taking an app, talking to Alexa, or pressing a button all takes too much time. Why can’t we in 2022 just point at a device and snap our fingers to turn things on and off? I decided to fix it in this weekend project!…

Analysing my swim stroke

Recently I tried to improve my swimming skills. I’m trying to get better at longer distances, swimming with less effort, and going a bit faster. In some videos they talked about optimising the amount of strokes you take per minute, and your pace per 100 meter. Apparently there is a certain sweet spot you have to hit, and there are…

Landing the perseverance rover on mars

This week the perseverance rover landed on mars! A big congratulations for everyone at NASA who made this possible! It’s a stunning engineering feat which I followed closely on Youtube. Something I noticed is that they mentioned they can land the rover more precise than last time because they use visual localisation (‘terrain-relative navigation’) during the landing. Last week NASA…

Sending a Neural Network to the Moon

Sending a neural network to the moon I absolutely love space, and am obsessed with the moon. Last week /r/Valphon on Reddit posted that he ordered a “moonbox”. Apparently a company called Atrobotic, together with DHL, is offering to send things to the moon for quite an afforable price. He is giving out 10MB of storage space on a first…

Using emojis in mathematical notation

Math is hard to understand. Whenever I read technical documents I skip the mathematical equations. When I do read them I have to go over them multiple times to fully finally what the author meant. A major problem is that in my head I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character. What makes this…

Building a Jack Skellington Mask

This week it’s Halloween! Time to dress up as something scary! I decided that I wanted to make the mask of Jack Skellington, from “The Nightmare before Christmas“. I used my 3D printer to print a design I found on the internet. In this post I will describe how it went, things I tried, and things I learned.  First of…

Building a Remote Controlled IKEA Table

Inspired by the show Pat and Mat (Buurman en Buurman in the Netherlands) I decided to build a remote controllable IKEA table. For this project I got help from my friend Ilya, with whom we conducted many experiments before we got something which could drive! A long time ago I saw this episode of the show Pat and Mat, in…

LEGO Apollo Saturn V Rocket Lamp

I absolutely love everything related to space! When decorating our apartment we decided to add a little ‘space corner’ in the hallway for all space related decoration. One thing we bought for this is the LEGO Apollo Saturn V rocket. It first simply hang on the ceiling as an amazing decorating piece. However, I decided to spice it up by…