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.
What do you do, when you need a small shelf, the next Ikea store is miles away and you don’t have a car to get there? You build your own, out of the many cardboard boxes that you get when you order online. The shelf has 2 levels and I combined 2 card boxes from the same shop. The result is a pret...
March 22, 2014
basteln
cardboard
ikea
shelf
I replaced my old Omron pedometer with the Withings Pulse. The OLED display and the design are nice. However it has one design flaw - it’s impossible to attach the little device to your trousers in a secure way. It’s really easy to loose the Withings Pulse with the original mount, when you are us...
February 26, 2014
allgemeines
basteln
technik
pouch
withings pulse
I won the TinkerForge Weather Station at the Infineon 2013 online Christmas give-away event. It took a little while for the Infineon reindeer to deliver it, but here it is 🙂 Assembling the kit (it consisting of a handful of laser cut Plexiglas, lots of screws and nuts and of course some electroni...
February 16, 2014
schaltungen/ics
technik
brick
bricklet
tinkerforge
Introduction My new bicycle is special, so special, that normal mudguard systems do not fit or, at best, are keeping only half of the dirt away from me. So I decided to make my own mudguard system .. the „Bike Shield“. Hand drawing Before I set of to design my Bike Shield in a CAD program, I drew...
November 17, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
gebasteltes
welt draußen
3d print job
3d printed prototypes
3d printer
bicycle
bike shield
cad program
designspark mechanical
mudguard
mudguard system
paper prototype
spaceclaim engineer
This app (written in Processing) is our entry for the Intel Perceptual Challenge. It tries to help computer users maintaining a better posture. Sit Perfect detects the users face and determines, if the user sits too near or too far away from the monitor. We use the face detection algorithm of the...
September 01, 2013
technik
intel perceptual challenge
posture
sdk
sit perfect
webcam
What could be better to start a Saturday morning, than a cup of tea boiled with the heat of the sun. — Ok, maybe a cruise in the Caribbean 😉
August 10, 2013
basteln
technik
umweltmaus
welt draußen
cooker
solar
solar cooker
sun
tea
water
This GoPro Ikea Kitchen Timer Mount is ideal to make cool time lapse videos with your GoPro camera. I made this video this morning (weather is pretty bad at the moment :/ )
May 31, 2013
basteln
gebasteltes
3d print
goprp
ikea kitchen timer
stl
time lapse
My rear reflector couldn’t be mounted anywhere on my new bike. So I printed my own mount to put the reflector below my bicycle seat. The stl-file can be downloaded at thingiverse.com.
May 31, 2013
basteln
gebasteltes
3d printer
bicycle
rear reflector
In the last weeks I assembled the Hexy robot together. Soon after building everything together I found out, that the power supply is not capable of powering the robots 19 servo motors. I use five Eneloop rechargeable batteries. And even those quality batteries are not able to fully power the robo...
May 30, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
technik
current
current shunt amplifier
hexapod
hexy
kickstarter
robot
voltage
Recently we stress tested a Raspberry Pi and checked how hot it got [link]. We were asked to repeat this experiment, with an overclocked RasberryPi. This took a little bit longer then expected but here are the results. The test setup Disclaimer: By no means did we use a nice test setup. So please...
May 30, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
schaltungen/ics
technik
raspberry pi
stress test
thermal shot
A few days ago I received an email, that tinkercad.com is back in business. I like their easy and intuitive 3D cad tool. Here you can find my current design, a USB stick holder, a simple design that only took minutes to design and a few minutes more to print it out. You can download the 3D file h...
May 20, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
3d print
3d printer
usb stick holder
During my last vacation my umbrella got broke again. Ordinary people would throw it away, but I wanted to fix it. Back home a printed a small tube with my 3D printer. This tube is just fitting over the small broken part. With some glue it should work till the next rain storm in NYC. Download: STL...
May 15, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
3d printer
diy
fix it
repair
umbrella
Just today I also finished this exciting project, a camera rail for the GoPro action camera. It is based on the rails from the german company Igus (link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260306114000/https://www.igus.de/). I printed two clamps with my 3D printer and added them to the ends of the rai...
April 20, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
technik
3d printer
camera rail
go pro
gopro
igus
slider
The „Hexy“ is a hexypod roboter from Kickstarter. As always it took quite long until I received it and some parts were missing. Fortunately they were easy to replace. The manual made it pretty easy to put everything together. Here is what I experienced during the assembly: At first I assembled th...
April 20, 2013
allgemeines
hexy
hexypod
kickstarter
printrbot
robot
Its pretty interesting to measure ones heart beat. A lot of fancy analog circuitry is needed for this. But fortunately there is a Arduino shield for this: the SHIELD-EKG-EMG from Olimex. Hardware: Software: Preparation: Results: If the conductivity is bad, you might get a noisy image like this: O...
March 31, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
gebasteltes
technik
arduino
ecg
ekg
olimex
olimexino-328
shield
shield-ekg-emg
My Evo/Mint cleaning robot made some crunching noises when it was driving and cleaning around my floor. So I thought it’s time for a quick maintance. It’s pretty easy to open the enclosure of it. Just unscrew these for screws: After that you can see what’s inside. Surprisingly there are two big w...
March 31, 2013
allgemeines
basteln
gebasteltes
technik
cleaning robot
dirt devil
evo
irobot
mint
After the thermal shots of the Raspberry Pi I also made some therma images of my UP! Plus 3D printer. pre-heating Pre-heating is important to minimize wrapping. After 10min of pre-heating the heat-bed has a temperature of 55°C. 
