Articles

I found a cheap 4 wheel drive chassis on eBay and decided to make a remote controlled robot out of it. Thus, I made a simple board with two H-bridge modules, an NRF24L01 wireless module and Arduino pro mini.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine was organizing an event to promote eco-friendly behaviors. She wanted someone to talk about our relationship with energy and asked me to give a presentation on the topic, which I agreed to. I wanted the presentation to be entertaining so I designed a set of hardware demonstrations aimed at explaining physical concepts related to energy.

RFID tags are great but often easy to lose. To solve this problem, I designed this case for an RFID tag, which can be worn on one's wrist using a standard watch strap. The case was designed using Fusion360 and then 3D printed.

With the cloud native multi-user MQTT platform deployed, I started designing IoT devices that I could distribute to end users. However, without a GUI, interacting with those devices would be difficult. Of course, one could install applications like MQTT dash or similar but this would require tedious configuration such as MQTT broker and topics. I wanted to give users a simpler UX so I made this simple control interface that automatically displays a users devices and allows those to be controlled.

Have you ever bought a piece of clothing only to come home and realize you already had a similar one in your wardrobe? This happened to me the other day so I decided to fix the problem. To do so, I designed a simple web application in which the user can keep track of all the garments they own.

An image is worth a thousand words and probably even more if comparing their size in bytes. When designing my CMS, I originally intended to store images directly in the article, encoded in Base64. However, this would considerably increase the size of each article, making the whole CMS slow.

With the user management and group management microservices, users and their groups can be easily queried through HTTP requests. However, the GUI that the user interacts with must also be properly designed so as to provide an optimal UX. To facilitate the query of users via the GUI, I designed a group and user picker component for Vue.js that can be easily installed using NPM.

As a graph database Neo4J is a great choice to manage highly relational data. On the other side, a great number of applications feature at least some form of user management system. With Neo4J, those users can be store as nodes and connected to other items via relationships. A typical example would be a blog, where both articles and users are individual nodes while authorships are represented by a relationship.

Publishing articles on a website can be as simple as uploading HTML files to a web server. However, writing articles in raw HTML can be time consuming. A content management system (CMS) is an application designed to solve this issue by providing a simple way to create and manage web content directly from the web browser. There are many CMSs available, namely Wordpress or Joomla but I decided to create my own as a form of practice and in order to have it highly customized to my needs.