Jana M. Hemsing

Welcome to my landing page, it seems I have filled it up a bit, enjoy reading. Alerta!

about me

I'm an artist, and electronics & embedded engineer from Germany. In terms of engineering I am interested in designing elegant, aesthetic hardware, focusing on user integration and interaction. Furthermore, I'm interested in chemical biology, life sciences, and the metabolism and micro-biology of both, plants and humans. That's what led me to study chemical biology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). I also love learning and employing human languages.

My engineering and some of my art projects and be mostly found on GitHub, although I am slowly migrating to Codeberg

You can also find me at FAFO, an association for open-source semiconductor research, which I co-founded.

I started running a blog, I won't be publishing on any schedule, but I desire to document more projects there. You can find it on blog.janamarie.dev

My photography is hosted at portfolio.janamarie.dev, a page that is always in need of me updating it. I try to make my pages as accessible as I can, this requires me to write a lot of alt-texts, making it a bit more of a burden updating my portfolio. I do post most of my photos on social media, at @janamarie

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.

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

In recent times I worked on a new STM32 breakout board, called the Analog-Toolkit, a small and simple analog-to-USB acquisition tool.

My open-source projector platform ligra also found some good reception.

A longstanding interest of mine, cameras and imaging technology lead me to developing my own camera, the OtterCam-s3. I already have plans for a better and bigger platform, the OtterCam-z7, but that must wait for now.

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.

projects, hardware

projects, software

projects, web

projects, art

projects, everything else

talks, workshops, publications & press

unpublished projects

defunct projects

contact

You can contact me via Mastodon or reach out by email: hello@janamarie.dev in English, German, Spanish, 中文 or French. You can find my CV here. I used to have Twitter, but I deprecated that account when the network went fascist.

I have no idea how to do web-stuff.