LiteStep screenshots
some old screenshots of my desktop using LiteStep
Desktop as of the end of December 2000 Desktop in mid-2001 LiteStep Setup at beginning of 2003 Testing PearPC in june of 2004 Desktop in september of 2004
About this Blog
This blog documents my increasingly complex projects combining electronics, microcontrollers, software and lots of too much hot glue.
My main interest over the last few years has been 3D printing but I am now at a point where I mainly use it for other projects in a supporting role instead of mainly just improving and upgrading my printer.
One of these days I will start a new big 3d printing project (maybe a voron or getting into SLA).
If I have any project that is worth documenting for one reason or another I will post it into the Projects or one of the other categories. The junkdrawer has a few things that didn’t quite work out as I had planned. Some of them could now be trivial to do with better knowlege and more resources.
Digital Assistants
Running your Digital Assitant for home automation locally
When getting an Alexa a few years ago I was positively suprised how well speech rexogniton in German was working now. Sadly the way Alexa needed a connection to a server and that always felt a bit wrong to me. During 2020 I decided to check if it might be possible to run a limited digital assistant locally.
There are a few variants but only one that fit the bill when it cames to local only recognition in German: the Rhasspy project.
Solar lights too
power managent in a simple application
While the firefly jars were nice they lacked the utility of a simple solar light. The way I had to use epoxy to fix the panels inside the jar was also a bit of an annoyance. A light would also need some diffusion to work well. I decised to trade a some of longetivity for convinience and lower BOM and start using simple glass jars with metal screw tops. The glass should be milky and thus scatter the light of a few warm white leds to give the light a nice glow.
3D Printer - the beginnings
printer mutations
Over the few months that I had the printer I changed it quite a bit.
3D Printer Aug 2016 Its a running gag that most of the things you print on a 3d printer are 3d printer parts. This turns out to be all too true since 3d printer parts are both useful(for 3d printing) and give you a sense of having accomplished something right away (since that part is useful right away).
Kindle hacking
slight kindle modifications
I have been a fan of the Amazon Kindle e-readers ever since I first was able to get my hands on a Kindle 3 Keyboard. I had been pining for a way to read electronic books on something other than a computer screen for a long time.
Of course what I find most interesting about the Kindle e-readers is how easy they are to root - relatively speaking of course. Some fine soldering is required.
Firefly jars
Lets build solar powered glass jars that come alive with simulated fireflys at night.
Around 2010 I started to experiment with solar power. Since outside isn’t the best of environments for electronics I came upon the idea to do a solar firefly glass. A glass made for canning food would be completely moisture resistant and stable.
Along the way I learned a lot about how to harvest energy from the enviroment and most importantly that hotglue will melt inside a glass yar in summer.
My Litestep modules
modules I made for LiteStep in the early 2000s
I spend much of the late 90ies and the first half of the 2000s making modules for Litestep. I am keeping the source code and binaries for these old projects here. All modules were made in Delphi 2.0 and doing low-level win32 system programming with it was sort of my thing.
All of these are truely obsolete by now and should have newer better made replacements. Litestep Modules I made