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KiCon Europe 2026: Trip Report without the Trip

kicad conferences open-source pcb bochum skunkforce

Three days of KiCon Europe 2026 at Gleis 9 in Bochum from the organiser's chair: KiCad 11 previews from Wayne Stambaugh, ngspice 47, open source test rigs, rigid-flex in space, a browser KiCad I am not sold on, and Seth Hillbrand's eight-hour training. Plus what changes for 2027.

Counting Raindrops with a Capacitor: The 25square Sensor, Its STM32, and the Patent Behind It

daq measurement stm32 lwip poe mqtt lora sensors patent mfund bochum edge-compute

How Auto-Intern built the street-level rain sensors for the 25square heavy-rain nowcasting project: a capacitive impact plate instead of a piezo, an STM32 with lwIP over PoE, a LoRa variant for the lampposts, and the jointly held patent DE 10 2020 119 488 B4 with Okeanos.

skAInet Edge-Compute: The Box We Kept Rebuilding Now Has a Product Page

electronics embedded linux monitoring engineering

Auto-Intern's skAInet Edge-Compute is now a product with its own site: a sealed M12-PoE switch, router and 8-core Linux compute module for industrial edge data acquisition. What it is, where it came from, and where I fit in.

ALINX AX7020, Stages 2 & 3: A Yocto Linux in QSPI Flash That Fetches Its Own Updates

fpga alinx zynq yocto linux u-boot kexec dropbear fit-image qspi embedded bring-up

Stages 2 and 3 of the open bitstream pipeline: a self-built Yocto Linux for the ALINX AX7020, resident in QSPI flash, discoverable on the company network, key-only SSH: the walkthrough that works, followed by the nine detours it took to get there.

ALINX AX7020 Bring-up: Mainline U-Boot Over JTAG, No FSBL, No Serial Cable

fpga alinx zynq jtag openocd u-boot spl device-tree netconsole bring-up linux

Stage 1 of the open bitstream pipeline: putting mainline U-Boot on an ALINX AX7020 over JTAG and Ethernet only: a clean walkthrough of what works, followed by the nine detours it took to find out.

Deploying Hardware Like Software: A Bitstream Pipeline for the Zynq

fpga embedded linux open-source

Alinx sent me an AX7020 board. Here is the plan: an open-source path from JTAG bring-up to a REST API that accepts a bitstream and loads it onto the FPGA, no vendor tools in the loop.

Why Does Copper Conduct? A Tour for Non-Physicists

physics education

Copper conducts, diamond doesn't, yet both are packed with electrons. A walk from single atoms to energy bands that explains why, ending with a back-of-the-envelope number that lands within ten percent of the measured conductivity of copper.

Digital Communication: Getting a Thought Out of One Head and Into Another

electronics embedded information-theory education

Communication has one job: move the internal state of one system into another. This is a walk from a thought in your head to a wave on a wire, through the four sides of a message, a water canal, a push-pull driver, Shannon's channel, and the eye diagram that measures it all.

Dual Uplink, Part Two: From Failover to Load Balancing (and the Two Bugs That Broke It)

networking linux

The follow-up to our dual-uplink failover setup: weighted multipath load balancing, source-based policy routing, pinning a host to one link, and the two persistence bugs that silently killed it on every reboot.

From Bitstream to Idea: An Inverse Guide to FPGAs

fpga open-source

The ghdl-yosys-nextpnr toolchain for an iCE40, walked backward: starting from a blinking LED and tracing every transformation back to the idea that caused it.

Correlation, Causation, and the Overton Window That Only Shrinks

philosophy personal

Everyone knows the first half of the aphorism. The second half is where the actual thinking happens, and I think the reflex to stop at the first half is doing something worse than being lazy.

What AI Actually Is

ai philosophy education

Running a chat model is not AI. The training process is. Everything else follows from that distinction, including where the human niche survives.

From the UAT to the Modern Neural Network

ai information-theory history education

We have the bit. Now the question is what we can compute with it, and whether a machine can learn to compute things nobody explicitly programmed. The answer runs from Hilbert through Turing to a theorem most engineers have never heard of.

From Aristotle to the Bit

information-theory philosophy history education

The bit did not fall from the sky in 1948. It is the last step in a chain that starts with a Greek philosopher arguing about sea battles and ends with Claude Shannon measuring surprise.

How Monolatry Shapes My Worldview

philosophy history personal

From polytheism as a map of the inner life, through the slow emergence of the individual voice, to the moment one god is raised above the rest, and what that means for how I actually live.

Post the Wrong Answer. You'll Learn More.

philosophy personal

Cunningham's Law says the fastest way to get the right answer online is to post the wrong one. I've been doing this accidentally for years, and I think there's something serious underneath the joke.

Zero to One: Python Libraries, Environments, and Working Like You Mean It

python education zero-to-one

You do not have to write everything from scratch. Python has thousands of libraries. But the way you pull them in matters, and most introductions get that part wrong.

WTF are FPGAs: A Beginner's Overview of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

fpga electronics education

FPGAs are not microcontrollers with more pins. They are a fundamentally different category of IC, and understanding what lives inside one changes how you think about digital hardware entirely.

A Hill I Am Willing to Die On: HDL for PCB Netlists

pcb engineering ai

Schematics are not where PCB design should start. Netlists should be generated from a structured hardware description language, and that changes everything about how AI fits into the picture.

Physics Doesn't Explain Anything. And That's the Point.

physics philosophy education

My high school teacher told me physics explains the world. Years later I think that's completely wrong, and understanding why changes everything about how you approach the subject.

Autonomous Will, Heteronomous Will, and the Work of Becoming Yourself

philosophy personal

Kant draws a sharp line between acting from your own reason and acting from external pressure. But where does your reason actually come from? An exploration of autonomy, heteronomy, archetypes, and the slow work of building a self you can stand behind.

Physics, Math, or Engineering? How do you decide

physics engineering education personal

What is the real difference between physics, mathematics, and engineering — and how do you choose the right degree? A personal account from someone who studied all three.

KiCon 2019: A Brief Trip Report

kicad conferences open-source pcb chicago

Chicago, April 2019: the first KiCon ever, organised by Chris Gammell at mHub. A week of hackerspaces, breakfast burritos, KiCad workshops and the moment the idea of a KiCon in Germany was born. Republished unchanged from my old Blogspot.

PDSC4K 2026: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

conferences

The Practical Data Science Congress (PDSC4K) in Bochum proved that small, deliberately compact events can deliver more signal than most large conferences — especially when the real topic is the messy reality of getting data from the physical world into models that don't lie to you.

Zero to One: Fun with SWD

embedded zero-to-one

You do not need to write a single line of C to talk to a microcontroller. With OpenOCD and a telnet connection you can toggle GPIO pins directly from your terminal — and that is exactly how we build a blinky on an STM32F303K8 Nucleo-32.

Simulating Antiproton Energy Loss in an HV-MAPS Silicon Sensor with Geant4

physics

A first-principles walkthrough of using Geant4 to simulate how much energy an antiproton deposits in a thin HV-MAPS silicon sensor — including a hand-worked Bethe-Bloch example, the Landau distribution, and why this matters for detector design before you ever see a beam.

Zero to One: VHDL and a Lattice iCEstick

fpga zero-to-one

A complete walkthrough of writing VHDL, simulating it with GHDL, and flashing a blinking LED onto a Lattice iCEstick — from zero assumptions to a physical result.

Viewing Plots from My Homelab Over SSH X11 Forwarding

linux networking

How to forward X11 through a bastion server to display images and plots from a home machine on a university workstation, without copying files.

How Two Teenagers, a Printer Plug, and a Forum Post Built a Company

automotive personal

Auto-Intern GmbH turns 25. This is the story of how it started: two kids in a bedroom, a GTI, an RS-232 adapter, and the accidental invention of a market.

Are Machines Conscious? A Snapshot

ai philosophy

What does consciousness mean — and where on that spectrum do beetles, dogs, humans, and language models sit? No final answers, but an honest attempt to think the question through.

The Game of Life and the Limits of Prediction

philosophy physics

A colleague called it 'useless math but super fun.' I objected. Conway's Game of Life connects self-replicating machines, Wolfram's computational irreducibility, and the unsettling possibility that entropy is not just disorder — it is the universe refusing to be calculated.

Zero to One: A Personal Journal Bot with Telegram and Gemini

python ai zero-to-one

I spent a day building a Dockerized Telegram bot that turns voice messages and scattered thoughts into a structured journal, Obsidian topic notes, and a compiled LaTeX memoir — and what I learned about LLM APIs along the way.

Enclosureless Cases: When the PCB Is the Enclosure

pcb electronics open-source

Enclosureless Cases: a patented approach to PCB housing where three stacked PCBs form a sealed, EMC-shielded enclosure using a perimeter solder joint — no injection moulding, no tooling, no separate supply chain.

A Database Is Not an API

databases engineering python

Why we never expose a database directly — how to layer FastAPI, Keycloak, and PostgreSQL for clean access control, testable endpoints, and a stable client interface.

The Recursion Problem in Relational Algebra

databases education

Relational algebra cannot express recursive queries — here is why transitive closure is outside the algebra's scope, and what SQL's WITH RECURSIVE actually means.

Zero to One: Why a Filesystem Is Not a Database

databases education

Why relational databases exist — a teaching practicum that makes students feel the pain of querying 120 CSV files with shell tools before showing them SQL. Imperative vs. declarative, made concrete.

If We Can Measure It, You Can Improve It

ai monitoring philosophy

Why we build monitoring systems — the case for industrial automation as human liberation, retrofit over greenfield, and why the sensor is the critical missing link between AI and the physical world.

Travelling to China with a Peli Case Full of Electronics

electronics conferences

Practical guide for engineers flying to China with professional electronics — ATA Carnet process, Frankfurt customs, Guangzhou departure, apps to install, and a full pre-trip checklist.

EMC in Dongguan: 2.5 Years of Work, 4 Days in a Test Chamber

electronics monitoring

CE, FCC, and CCC certification in Dongguan — four days at NTC test lab with a PoE-based reflow oven monitoring system after 2.5 years of development. What we tested, what we found, and what the anodized housing almost cost us.

Ten Years of Conferences: What They're Actually For

conferences personal open-source

Ten years of attending and organising technical conferences — what they're actually for, why the hallway track beats the programme, and how emBO++ grew from four people to 250. Lessons from Meeting C++, KiCon, GSI, and ISO C++.

Dual Uplink for 15 People: Starlink, Heimdall, and Linux Routing

networking linux

How to set up dual uplink failover for an office network using Linux routing, Starlink, and metric-based default routes — with a Python dashboard to monitor both links in real time.

Ten Years of PowerSense: Blood, Sweat, and Ferrite Cores

electronics monitoring engineering

How we built a non-contact PoE power monitor for DB Netz railway switching stations — ten years of E-field sensing, embedded ferrite cores, EMC certification, and the hardware lessons that shaped everything since.

PCB Design Starts With a README

pcb engineering ai

Before opening KiCad, create a README and let an LLM generate a PlantUML block diagram. Why writing design intent first prevents costly PCB mistakes — with a worked STM32F7 example.

Biofilms in Rivers: EIS at the Clark Fork

electronics monitoring

How a governor's reception in Montana led to a year of instrument development with Montana State University — building a portable EIS datalogger for biofilm detection and deploying it in the Clark Fork River.

KiCon Asia 2025: Speaking on Wire Bonding in Shenzhen

pcb conferences physics

Talk at KiCon Asia 2025 in Shenzhen on wire bonding CLICpix and MuPix detector chips — two years of hands-on bonding with a Delvotec, condensed into 25 minutes. Slides and video included.

OmnAIScope: A USB Oscilloscope for Automotive Diagnostics

pcb electronics automotive open-source

OmnAIScope is an open-access USB oscilloscope for automotive diagnostics, built on RP2040 with multi-channel USB synchronisation — no hardware trigger needed. How it works, the server architecture, and where to get it.

Getting Started: From Tape-Out to TypeScript

personal engineering

Stephan Bökelmann writes about monitoring systems, embedded engineering, ASIC development, and university-level programming — from silicon to frontend. First post: what this blog covers and why.

KiCon Europe 2024: Bochum Goes International

pcb conferences open-source

KiCon Europe 2024 in Bochum — 150 engineers and designers, KiCad lead developers Wayne Stambaugh and Seth Hilbrand on stage, talks on open hardware, PCB design, and KiCad development. Full recap and YouTube playlist.

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