Since some time now, I am running my own private server with a couple of different services. The website which you are currently reading is also hosted on this server. I want to give a short overview about the technical background and summarize some of my experience from the last years. Hosting Provider When I started, I was using Netcup but switched to Hetzner since a couple of weeks. In general, I was looking for a hosting provider with Linux root servers located in Germany. Ideally, the company would run their servers on renewable electricity and have a fair price. ...

I have added a new subsection to my webpage which acts as a journal for any DIY-related topics. Me and some friends will add failures as well as successes from our daily lives to it. Take a look here. Technical Background As I wanted to make contributing to this “blog” as easy as possible, I created a telegram chatbot. As an activated contributer, you can simply talk to the @diyary_kg9_bot. It will guide you through creating a new blogpost. ...

The final project of my studies was the master’s thesis. It has the rather long title “Improving Efficiency in X-Ray Computed Tomography Using Compile-Time Programming and Heterogeneous Computing”. Specifically, my task involved the open source software elsa which is developed at the computational imaging and inverse problems group at the Technical University of Munich. As I have enjoyed my involvement in Free and Open Source Software before, most notably with MoveIt, I was happy to again contribute to a larger public project. ...

I participated in the 2019 edition of Google Summer of Code. I was lucky to work with great mentors on MoveIt, which is part of the Robot Operating System (ROS). For more details, see this blogpost.

In this post, I want to give a quick overview how you can remote control a small mobile robotics platform with a game controller. We will use the joy package of ROS to have the device publishing ROS messages. The necessary steps are described in “Setting up the Joystick” in the teleop ROS tutorial. I will quickly summarize them here. Controller Setup Plug in your controller and check if its available with ...

As I had an old LEGO NXT set lying around at home, I decided to set up my little mobile autonomous robotics platform with it. The nice thing about LEGO is that I can quickly change anything I want without having to drill, cut or glue. Its fun and and it remembers me of my youth when I was building huge LEGO models for hours with a friend of mine. ...

This is a follow up post to the introduction to ROS and the Beagle Bone Blue (BBBL). I will guide you through compiling your first own ROS node which contains some functionality of the robotcontrol library. This library is specifically made for the BBBL and enables the robotics functionality of the board (I/O ports, I2C, PWM, UART, etc.). It usually comes with the preinstalled images if you followed the previous post. Otherwise, you can install it with ...

See github for code and my thesis as a pdf. For my bachelor thesis, I had the opportunity to work for six months at the Namerikawa Laboratory at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. The contact came through my professor Oliver Sawodny at the Institute for System Dynamics at the University of Stuttgart where I did my undergraduate studies. The lab focuses mainly on distributed control topics in the field of smart grids but also with agents such as drones ...

See here for the code. During the summer semester 18, I had the opportunity to take part in the practical course ‘Large-scale Machine Learning’ offered by Prof. Guennemann at TUM. In my team, consisting of four people, we worked on mining public transport data in Munich provided by the company running the buses and trams (MVG). Almost every household in Munich is located within 400 meters of an underground or tram station or a bus stop. The resulting network adds up to more than 587 km of routes for buses and trams only, which are served by 461 vehicles that stop approximately 345,000 times a day and log their position and status every few seconds. ...

A programmers perspective For a long time, I was a strong advocate of a two screen setup whenever I could. Although I still see some benefits in having more real screen space, I have changed my general attitude. The reason for this is that having virtual workspaces gives me a very similar experience. And this wherever I want. As a student, I am only rarely working from the same place. Sometimes I code at the university, sometimes I am sitting at a friends place and another day I am somewhere on the road. If you are comfortable with your virtual workspace setup nothing hinders you from coding with 100% efficiency because the only thing you need is your laptop. In the past, I was pretty frustrated when I could not work at home where I had my second large screen. However at some point, I realized that I could be as efficient using virtual desktops. ...