Jana Marie Hemsing

Welcome to my landing page, it seems I have filled it up a bit now, enjoy reading. Meow! :3

about me

I'm an electronics and embedded engineer from Germany interested in designing elegant hardware, focusing on user integration and interaction. Furthermore, I'm interested in chemical biology, life sciences, photography digital and analog, and the metabolism & micro-biology of both, plants and humans. That's what led me to study chemical biology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), which I am currently pursuing alongside my job. I love to explore (human) language and how it shapes our thoughts, behaviors, actions and the different environments we all live & survive in. In terms of work, I design human-machine interfaces with a San Francisco startup. I also do personal projects and get into things that currently spark my interests, such can usually be found on my GitHub. I'm an anti-facist, anti-authoritarianist and anti-capitalist.

Anyhow, here is a, probably incomplete, list of everything I have done so far.

projects, my favorites

As already mentioned above, most of my projects can be found on GitHub. But to give you a short glance, here are some of my better known projects. In January 2020 I released an open source USB-PD-based soldering iron, it is based upon the infamous TS100. This iron is still one of my most reliable tools that is always with me. It was followed by its pro version which accepts JBC handles and cartridges.

Around the same time I also launched my own devboard called OtterPill, of which I had ~200 units produced and shipped to various countries in the world. This devboard is still relevant to my work and is frequently used.

My biggest and most well know project is OtterCast, an open source audio streaming device running Linux. Like most of my other projects, it was created to fill a gap where no other devices were available. It is used on a daily basis by me, and a few other people and was developed by a wonderful team that I put together and led.

Since I wanted to learn Rust and had a problem I needed a solution for, I did so. This is very different from what I usually do, but it was also fun and taught me Rust very well! Hlcc was created by me, a hormone level conversion calculator with string input parsing. As it was compiled for web, a working version can be found at hlcc.haj.gf.

Another noteworthy, but also quite old project is TranspOtter, an award winning robotics platform for last mile transport.

I recently started reading about colours and how they can convey or underline messages. To experiment with series of colours and their interaction with themselfes I deployed this small colour-tool, currently showing a palette I created for a dark, witchy, herbaceous atmosphere.

A photo of a photo with mashup of various different scenes. It is really hard to find words to describe it, there is a huge blue seven segment display across the whole image. Several taped messages with doubles again across the whole image, saying “Trans Rights”, showing an e2 molecule and a trans-anarchy symbol. There is some red in the image, which is a faint image of two red umbrellas, they are hard to make out. There are several signs with an “X” and “Y” as well as arrows, escalator signs and numbers. There is a shop in the center saying “Würstelinsel” and a neon sign saying “Abbaubar”. There are some light spots and strips of random color.

Oh, and I also love photography. I have started uploading my photos to Flickr recently.

projects, hardware

projects, software

projects, web

projects, everything else

talks, workshops, publications & press

contact

Anyway, you can also contact me via Mastodon, LinkedIn, Flickr and Telegram, or reach out by email: hello@janamarie.dev in English, German, Spanish, toki pona, 中文 or French. You can find my CV here. I used to have Twitter, but I deprecated that account when the network went sideways.

meow c:

I mean, why do I need a fancy landing page? Finding me (cuddling blåhajs) is not that hard and if you want to chat, drop me a line! I'm always open for a nice conversation and or tea. :3

Also, I have no idea how to do web-stuff, yet the last two paragraphs were intentionally hidden.