About me¶
Hi, I’m Ben.
I like to UNDERSTAND, BUILD and FIX.
It doesn’t matter if I’m troubleshooting a boat engine while being at a remote anchorage days away from the next village or hunting down a tricky bug while sitting in my office - UNDERSTAND, BUILD and FIX follow me wherever I go.
As a software engineer I spend my days understanding, building and fixing programs. In my free time I like to spend my time building physical things like furniture, electronic circuits and small objects which make my life easier in one way or another.
Once a month a volunteer at our neighborhoods repair cafe where we repair whatever people bring us. Coffee machines, vacuum cleaners, radios, toasters, lamps… The primary goal is fixing but every time I come home I’m impressed by how much I did learn by taking these objects apart.
Until now my activities were mostly either virtual or physical. I decided to join Fab Academy to learn how to bring these two worlds together by creating physical objects from virtual code. I’m looking forward to learn new things, build a lot of prototypes and I’m super excited to do so together with a group of like-minded people.
Previous project - snail sorter¶
A while back my cousin used to have a snail farm. When it was time to sell the snails they had to be collected and divided in different categories by weight. It was a really boring job to weight thousands of snails and put them in different bags. Together with her brother we decided to automate the weighting and sorting.
When a snail is positioned on the sorter, its weight is measured with a load cell and depending on the weight the tray is tilted in a different direction so that the snail falls in the right bag for its weight
