You like to cook. At some point your knives are becoming dull. If you don’t want to continue working with dull knives, you need a sharping tool. There exist thousands of sharpening tools out there with two of them being: Grinding Stone Electric Knife Sharpener Let’s compare those two in a couple of categories. Grinding Stone Simplicity: It’s a stone. I don’t think it gets any simpler than that. I think the word repair does not even make sense. ...

This post gives a quick overview about the software I run on my PCs. In general, I am looking for keyboard centric tools which follow the UNIX philosophy (doing one thing right). Ideally, the tool integrates well into the terminal because that is where I spend a lot of my computer time - besides the browser maybe. Operating System Arch Linux. I was an Ubuntu user before but switched to Arch Linux since some years now. The rolling release models gives me access to the latest software and I only rarely have any stability issues. Arch also allows me to run my own customized desktop experience without any pre-installed other packages. Additionally, the AUR is a great resource for additional packages. ...

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 ...