This week I made a new project: a Tesla-coil powered Pikachu! It’s essentially a 3D printed pikachu which emits sparks. What’s cool about it is that I can also play the pokemon theme tune through it and use it to amplify my electric guitar. The below video best show-cases it. The setup is very simple with a store-bought Tesla coil,…
Being a “Top Programming Voice on LinkedIn”
Looks like LinkedIn awarded me a “Top Programming Voice” badge. Although I am always quite vocal about the field of programming and machine learning I earned this badge by copy-pasting a single quote: > “Before you read on, consider if you actually want to read an article generated by AI with expert opinions rather than just reading an article fully…
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…
Visualising lidar and radar in virtual reality
Last week someone pointed out the Astyx dataset to me. So far I only visualised lidar data in my virtual reality tool immersivepoints.com, so I was interested in seeing how radar could be integrated as well. The Astyx dataset is provided by what is now Cruise. The dataset can be downloaded for free, and contains data from three sensors: A…