Welcome to Zipfelmaus — a blog about electronics, tinkering, and the occasional detour into everyday life.
This domain has a colorful history — at one point it was hijacked by domain squatters who used it for all sorts of nonsense. We took it back and turned it into what it was always meant to be: a place to document projects and share ideas.
Zipfelmaus is primarily written by Sebastian, an electrical engineer with a weakness for microcontrollers, 3D printers, and DIY projects — and Robert, a software developer who occasionally chimes in from the programming side. Over the years, you'll find everything here from Arduino builds and custom weather stations to Kickstarter post-mortems and honest gadget reviews. Some posts are in German, some in English.
Blogposts
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We spotted this on the e-ink subreddit and immediately ordered one. A custom solar energy dashboard, running for months on a single charge — sold.
What makes TRMNL special is the philosophy behind it: fully open source, hackable by design, screws instead of glue. Don't want to build your own hardware? Just buy the assembled version. Don't want to depend on their cloud? Run one of several self-hosted server implementations — including one maintained by TRMNL themselves.
That last part is what gets me. A company that open-sources its own server backend isn't just paying lip service to the maker community. That's genuine commitment.
The plugin ecosystem (900+) and the no-subscription model seal the deal. This is how hardware products should be built.
My Ikea Pax sliding closet is already over 10 years old now, but it should be no excuse not to do its job anymore. But the height adjustment did not work properly and eventually one of the two doors felt out of the closet onto my TV. The reason was, the adjustment system was very poorly designed ...
Starting with a new hardware platform often has its own issues. The same principle applies also to the Infineon Xensiv Sensor 2Go Kit. Here are the issues I have encountered so far: Another issue is the documentation itself, it's also not error free. The Optiga Quickstart Guide tells you to conne...
Today was quite a rainy day, so I was lucky to be invited to the Intel AI Devcamp in Munich. The reason I signed up for this event was to find out, what the current workflow of the AI tools is. Quite some time has passed since I last had some contact with this field. Six years ago I did a person ...
November 24, 2018
technikcnnintelintel aiintel ai devcampmlmovidiusmunichtensorflow
During the Electronica 2018 Fair in Munich Infineon was very kind and provided me with a brand new XENSIV Sensors IOT Box. This box is not yet available on the market and will launch probably in Q1/2019. The box features the XMC2GO and XMC1000 bootkit (an Arduino Uno sized ARM Cortex MCU board) a...
In the last 12 month I supported only a few tiny projects, spending less then 50€ all together on crowd funding platforms like kickstarter. Compared to the years before that’s a huge drop. After many unsuccessful campaigns and products that where not as good as in the pitch videos, I have learned...
At our home we share a laundry room with our neighbors. In the recent time I have found some evidence that my washing machine has been used by someone else. So I decided to make it a little harder to use my stuff without asking for it. I designed an 3d printed safe for the machine’s socket plug. ...
What is it good for: The IR CAM PI Shield adds infrared LEDs to the Raspberry Pi camera Module. So you can take photos or videos in the dark. Costs: 13$ for PCB manufacturing (for 10 PCBs) -> I have left a few boards, ask if you are interessted. 3$ for IR LEDs 3$ for LDO 1-2$ for SMD resistors...
Introduction A few weeks ago I have found a link the BitScope website. BitScope is a manufacturer of handy low cost USB scopes. At their website everything looked nice and easy to use, so I ordered one of their tiny USB scopes. After the first test things looked a little different. In fact, I was...
April 30, 2016
uncategorizedawgbitscopeoscilloscopespicoscopesignal generatorusb scopeswave form generator
Introduction A few years ago I received a nice little LED lamp as a bonus in an online order. The lamp had one issue, the circuit was optimized for costs not for lifetime of the LEDs. Initial Ciruit After around of 10 hours of accumulated operation, the LEDs started to flicker. The reason was, th...
April 23, 2016
bastelntechnikuncategorized3d printerconstant current sourcedesignspark mechanicalled lamplm3410
This week I attended an Udemy course by ST Micro about the STM32F7 Discovery Board. It was a great, interactive experience since ST also send me the STM32F7 Discovery Board to try all the hands-on labs for myself. Udemy course site This MOOC course was the first of its kind and trough the interac...
Last year I built a green house for the tomatoes on my raised bed in my garden (original post: link. It basically consists of a wooden frame and air bubble film. As it turns out, after one year in service, the air bubble film is not UV resistant and it starts to get chapped and falls into little ...
Look at this video, where they tell you how easy it is to turn your bike, every bike into an e-bike within minutes. Ha, that was easy, right? After receiving the Flykly wheel, only with one year delay, I was very eager to turn my bike as well into an e-bike. And guess what, it totally didn’t work...
Recently I had a discussion about the support experience with the EDA tool supplier of my company. They failed to answer our support cases within 2 business days in 50% of the cases in 2015. I think this fact is even worse considering, that they charged us 15000€ for keeping the software up to da...
Last Friday (20.04.15) we experienced a partial eclipse of the sun in Germany. There were some headlines in online magazines saying, that there might be some issues with the electricity supply since the eclipse will impact many solar power plants. And in Germany there are quite many of them. &nbs...
Last weekend I received my Xiaomi/XIAOYI Smart Camera/small ants camera (I am a little confused what the real official name is, since it has also a YI on the box, and I thought that the Yi is more a kind of a GoPro camera). It is a nice inexpensive WiFi camera, that is similar to the Dropcam, but...
March 22, 2015
allgemeinessmall ants camerasmart camerawifi cameraxiaomixiaoyi
Headlines with IOT or the Internet of Things can be found everywhere. I was curious too. So I ordered TIs CC3200 LaunchPad - an interesting IOT platform. TI partnered with several service providers to help you to bring your device online. Namely: 2lemetry, Arrayent, Exosite, IBM and Xively. After...
Slowly it is getting cold outside. And like lots of other people my hands can get quite cold. A hand warmer is a neat way to warm your cold hands. In our little experiment today we would like to answer the following questions: - How does a handwarmer look like through IR? - How warm does it get? ...
After 3 years, it was time to start a new Google Spreadsheet and fill it with some information from my Kickstarter history. At first I could see, that I spend a heck lot of money - in sum 2822€ (holly molly) for 42 projects. 40% of that money just went to three projects: - Printrbot, my 3D printe...
Oberhof is a little german town in the middle of the Thuringian Forrest. During our stay we had the chance to try a Renault Twizy for one day. The Twizy is a tiny car and is fully electric powered. Instead of refueling it at a gas station, you refuel it in a socket. Here are our impressions We tr...
This spring we builded a L-shaped raised bed out of gabions in our garden. On the raised bed I planted some tomatoes. Tomatoes are not happy with direct rain. So I had to build a shelter for the tomatoe plants. I created a greenhouse out of some air bubble film, some cheap wooden strip and 3d pri...
Now it’s summer and our garden is in full bloom. And to keep all the plants alive on a hot summer day you can run twice a day with a watering can from a faucet to the plants back and forth, or you a hose - or you simply automize this task with a irrigation system. We have a combination of two irr...
Finding a right nozzle for my watering can wasn’t easy. I ordered one online, but it didn’t fit. A few years passed since then and the can didn’t work in the meantime. Recently I had the idea to print my own. The print took about 8,5h - my longest print ever. The nozzle fits on diameters of: x: ~...
Introduction Most people know e-ink or e-paper displays from reading devices like the „Amazon Kindle“. For a few months there are e-paper displays available that can be directly accessed by an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. One popular e-paper display kit is the „Repaper display kit“, that is availab...
March 24, 2014
allgemeinesarduinoe-inke-paperepaperkindleraspberry pi
Every time I’m on a business trip with the German bullet train ICE, the overhead rack is full of black suitcases. Often there’s another Rimowa case next to my one. One way to avoid confusion when picking your case from the rack when leaving the train, is to put some kind of unique luggage tag ont...
