I hope everyone who celebrates can enjoy the holiday regardless of lockdown!
Eid mubarak!
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Hi there,
Eid Mubarak! to everyone who celebrates.
Hope that the world will get through these tough times.
Thank You:)
Lock down was boring but we have to sacrifice this for the sake of the world 
EID Mubarak:)
While I am spending all my time at home, I was able to make a bunch of things. Have constantly had projects to build, solder and program. So at least I was able to channel the boredom into creative things.
That so cool:) what are you up to in terms of solder and program? Anything to share?
haha, where to begin?
I have recently gotten into modular synthesis. I was always interested in early synthesis (think Kraftwerk) and how the pioneers at BBC invented sound synthesis techniques. Now that mikrocontrollers are super available, there are countless DIY kits out there and it has become affordable to build a modular synthesizer. So I did 
I 3D printed two cases with two rows each and designed a bracket to mount both cases together. Lots and lots of soldering was involved to build the modules, about 60% of the modules are self built, rest is bought. Sadly my musical abilities have not yet grown very much, so I’d rather not share any recordings ^^. Once I will have produced something resembling a song, I will gladly share.
Here is a picture of the whole unit:
and finished:
There is also a glimpse of my new split keyboard, I am currently transitioning to it… in my daily job I use a normal keyboard for coding as I am not quick enough with the split yet, but I am getting there. Had to learn a bunch about qmk firmware and how to program it with a usable keyboard mapping, but there is so much more you can do with QMK, I am still exploring… for example changing the rgb colors for the mode the keyboard is in at the moment and stuff like that.
here it is with another keycap set that I did not like:
I was planning to build a unisolder 5.2 soldering controller for a while and have now finally done so, also with a 3D printed case:
Right now I use an Ersa iCon Pico station, but I would like to use JBC tools (T210, T245, microtweezers) and not pay for their overprices controllers
hopefully the unisolder station will enable me to use any iron I want without having three different controllers on my workbench.
I also got a roborock S6 vacuum cleaner that I rooted and took offline, which now runs the valetudo firmware. Had a few interesting insights into how these robots are built (hint: not very complicated, why isn’t there an opensource vaccum bot yet? )
I recently bought a DLP printer, which I need to design stuff for…
My next bigger project will be building my own laptop/cyberdeck. I swore two years ago that I will never ever buy another off the shelf laptop, unless it is fully repairable and hackable. So now I have all the parts to build something decent here, a nice 1080p IPS screen from shenzhen, a udoo bolt ryzen board for that sweet sweet speed (i don’t want a portable raspberry pi, I want a laptop replacment), a huge LiPo pack that can power the udoo for about 6 hrs with no power optimizations and lots of small parts. The last puzzle pieces missing, is the case design and getting everything printed. I want to explore combining FDM printed parts with DLP printed details for a more sophisticated look.
Another thing I did was to build a new NAS, used to have a Qnap device which served us fine for about 10 years, replaced this with a TrueNAS running on an HP microserver, that was a lot of fun as well and I have lots more space for backups now. Finally a homelab server beefy enough to run a couple of containerized services as well, for example HomeAssistant to manage IOT crap (the vacuum lol… oh and 3D printer monitoring), a secure container for managing passwords and certificates, Nextcloud instance etc.
I guess I have to stop here, otherwise I need to open a separate thread sooooo many projects that I didn’t mention
Woow 
so many projects… and all of them are heavy-duty:) Starting with the synthesizer it looks right out of a sci-fi movie:) I can’t imagine the solder work behind that picture. Well as an engineer all kinds of buttons and actuators look pleasing to me:)
Regarding the keyboard, it looks comfy to type with a split keyboard but it is really hard to switch from a traditional keyboard to a split keyboard. My colleague Enes has a Microsoft split keyboard, I tried it and could not type 10 fingers without looking at the keys. Once a get used to it, I returned my keyboard back and could not use my keyboard for at least 10 minutes:) It is so strange how the brain works, it only has storage for one keyboard layout How do you manage using split keyboard night time and normal keyboard day time
I started to hear roborock around, I think it is the best robot vacuum out there. Robot vacuums can be simple in terms of hardware vice. I think they are complex in software vice. I appreciate the guys who developed it
Our projects usually involve watchX We recently worked on a project to control a TELLO-named drone with wrist movements, that was heavily involved in software development. The end result was fun thoug. Here is the video of the project by Andrei https://youtu.be/AKSIGRdL-ts
Currently we are working on improving production efficiency of a factory with wearables:) I would love to give more information but the work is still under development:)
What do you do for daily coding:)
Oooh watchx as a drone controller is super cool! Looks like it was great fun.
I am very interested in wearables, wish I had the expertise to work on hardware like that professionally, but I am just a humble tinkerer who needs to rely on the knowledge of others. I always wanted to find an open hardware project for augmented reality glasses. All products out there either seem to be based on android running inside the glasses, but never are the glasses available simply as display devices.
Assisting technology on a factory floor must be a cyberpunk dream to develop, love it! Hopefully you will be able to talk about it in the future.
Switching between keyboard layouts is not as bad as I first thought. Using both keyboards regularly helps me train muscle memory. I already switch between German an US layout seemlessly, so adding the split to that isn’t much of a stretch. It would be harder if I decided to learn Dvorak or something like that, but I am not (entirely) crazy
The hardest for me is not typing blind, but using my fingers only on one side and not being able to cheat there.
For my day job as a web developer I code python, javascript and whatever needs to be used (e.g. bash scripts for CI/CD and everything I can leverage). The company I work for has an opensource web framework based on python, using serverless technologies in the Google AppEngine environment. Not a big fan of google and cloudifying everything, but it makes sense for our customers. We don’t just make websites, but offer complete solutions for all kinds of purposes, so we also integrate LoRa sensors and write companion apps for webservices at the same time, write custom WebGL VR applications for customers showrooms and stuff like that… it’s very fun for a hacker like me who doesn’t know much, because we can experiment so much. I wish I knew more electrical engineering though, I would love to be able to actually make hardware myself, like you guys do.
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