After completing my bachelor’s degree in informatics - software systems at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences I moved to Dortmund. There I got a M.Sc. in computer science at the Technical University of Dortmund focusing on algorithm engineering and graph drawing.
Since I wrote my bachelor thesis at adesso SE, I reentered the company as well as their subsidiary com2m GmbH during my master’s degree as a working student and began working full time after finishing it.
After 7 years I switched jobs and started working at Zalando in the FinTech area.
I’ve created a simple website for displaying sensor data from a weather station I’ve setup at my parent’s house.
My main goal was to learn more about AWS.
A more detailed explenation of this project can be found here.
I haven’t written a lot of blog posts in the past but I think that the core concept master thesis might be an interesting read if you are into graphs and algorithm engineering.
Beware, it is in German though: Effiziente Berechnung von K5-Minoren in Graphen.
Our fridge didn’t work properly: It wouldn’t turn off and cool down everything way too much.
I wrote a simple piece of code that used an IoT thermometer and a smart plug for cutting the power before our food frooze.
It ran on our server at home every minute but since we’ve got a new kitchen this spring it’s not actively used anymore.
I’ve though of repurposing the thermometers.
We have one in each room and the additional one from the fridge.
Putting that on the outside I could send myself a notification if the outside temperature is lower than the room temperature during the summer.
Living on the top floor isn’t easy sometimes…
Background: My oven has a timer which turns the oven off after a certain amount of minutes. However it doesn’t ring because it’s broken. While setting a timer on my smartphone or checking the oven regularly would be an option I am currently using a smart plug. That way I am able to poll the power consumption and send myself a message in Telegram when the oven turns itself off. I noticed that it takes about half a minute before the smart plug actually realizes it but that should be within reason for most use cases (dishwashers, ovens, coffee machines).
I placed a button on the home screen of my smartphone using an app called HTTP Shortcuts. Now my current workflow is
Throw a frozen pizza in the oven and set it’s timer to 15 minutes
Start the polling with a default of 25 minutes using the button on my home screen
There isn’t really a backstory. I bought a few smart plugs with a remote as well as this sensor to be able to send and receive their 433MHz signals. Forwarding this to a Raspberry Pi I was able to send rest calls by pressing a button on the remote which could control other smart home devices like the FritzPowerMonitor from above or Philips Hue light bulbs.
However the radio part isn’t very secure since it’s not encrypted. That’s why I barely use it today. The only regular usage of it is the dehumidifier that I turn on after showering. It get’s turned off again after a few hours by this service. However migrating this to the FritzPowerMonitor or having a bathroom with a window would probably be more sustainable.
Background: I have a server at home which runs Alpine with no additional software installed besides Docker and docker-compose (because why not). It basically allows me to deploy software quick and dirty while having everything tracked by Git. For example the server currently runs containers with Teamspeak, some IoT stuff as well as a tiny bit of data mining software and a private cloud. Since the related Docker files are public I moved passwords and secrets to a separate file.
This project is essentially a script that uses this file as well as the public placeholder files to generate the working configurations for the containers in directories not tracked by Git. Oh and of course it can be run using only Docker.
