Electronics, Programming and Development
The early days of wind- and PV-power were rough: the engineers fought against oil-leaks in the pitch-mechanism of wind-power-systems and PV-inverters lived up to their German name Wechselrichter (wechsel = change) in an unfortunate way, as they had to be replaced very often due to defects. But since the early 1990s lot of things have... Read More
A dynamic electricity tariff is a flexible pricing model where the cost of electricity changes hourly or in 15-minute intervals based on live exchange rates. In Europe the EPEX (European power exchange EPEX SPOT SE) is responsible for the day-ahead-trading. This dynamic tariff allows consumers to save money by shifting high-energy tasks to times when... Read More
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I... Read More
Since May 2025 I ve spent my spare time and some nightshifts on working on an OpenSource Operating System for the Behringer X32. 12 Months later, a community is growing around this software and a lot of things are already working quite well. In this video I d like to show you the result of one year... Read More
In my last post I showed how I used a neural network for a latency-free De-Feedback audio-plugin for live-applications. But as an electrical engineer for power electronics I was curious about how to use neural networks in control-algorithms. Why using neural networks in control-loops? Most of the time a simple proportional- and integral-control (PI-controller) is... Read More
Since November 2022 AI is present in the mainstream: OpenAI published the LLM ChatGPT. Around three years later AI is everywhere: image- and video-generation, translations, audio-plugins and much much more. Hard to believe, but I got in touch with AI 17 years before ChatGPT has been released. During my studies of electrical engineering around 2005,... Read More
The X32 has been around since 2012. But so far, there are no details on how signal processing is carried out in the mixing console. In this video, I would like to give you some insights into the reverse engineering that has been carried out so far. Over the past few months, we have been... Read More
Together with some students and a colleague I took part at the International Future Energy Challenge (IFEC) in 2024. It was a great opportunity to combine my interest on power-electronics, audio-technology and microcontrollers. The topic of this competition was to create a Class-D-Amplifier with three channels and 135W output-power per channel. Origin of the... Read More
In mid-2010s I ve spent weeks on comparing different topologies for inverters and DC/DC-converters for PV-applications. One of these topologies was quite interesting as it had a surprise when calculating the equations for the duty cycle. Under specific circumstances this duty cycle went from a positive real value into a complex imaginary value. To understand why... Read More
In 2023, I published a video on my YouTube channel about reading and processing the Behringer UltraNet protocol (see YouTube: Hacking Behringer s Ultranet for an FPGA-based DIY audio mixer). in this blog post I d like to take a bit more time to describe the background and the connection between the UltraNet device, FPGA, and the... Read More