Personal Blog about electrical engineering, IT and finishing projects.
A good smart home is one where I don’t have to fiddle around with my phone all the time. This philosophy has manifested as several physical switches spread across the apartment, controlling most essential functions. But especially in the winter when all windows stay shut, I found myself monitoring the room’s CO2 levels quite frequently. The quest to free myself from this unnecessary phone checking…
After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one. From the Philips product page: seems to be REALLY smart! Reverse Engineering Looking at the base of the head shows that it contains…
With all the hype surrounding chatGPT (and now GPT-4), it really bothered me that I don’t have the faintest idea of how language models or transformers work. Fortunately, the Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture series that helped me understand backpropagation in my previous post, also covers multiple language modeling techniques. I found that I spend too much time in my last post explaining…
As part of my master thesis, I implemented a spiking neural network from scratch on a microcontroller. Because training was done separately on a PC, I only had to write the forward pass. This was a big relief because PyTorches autograd always seemed like black magic to me (even after learning the theoretical background). So seeing a post on HackerNews about Andrej Karpathys amazing video series on…
Ever since I first discovered how to print my own name with the Windows command line as a child, I’ve been drawn to all kinds of programming projects. Many years later I blinked the first LED with an Arduino and the scope of my personal projects quickly expanded to the physical realm. So over time and many projects, I’ve accumulated an impressive pile of demos, proof of concepts, and mostly…