Hello,
my name is Jan Mrázek, but nearly everyone calls me Honza. I am a programmer and maker from the Czech republic. I like it when my projects having solid theoretical foundations and my personal projects are usually a combination of hardware and software.
My school life
I am a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. I work at the ParaDiSe laboratory on RoFIs – small robots, which can self-assemble into larger robots (just like Replicators from Stargate). Before RoFIs I worked on the DIVINE and the SymDIVINE model checkers. I also teach several seminar groups of courses:
- IB015: Non-Imperative Programming,
- IV003: Algorithms and Data Structures II,
- PB161: C++ Programming,
- PV264: Advanced Programming in C++.
I am also a co-author of the new KSI, which is an annual on-line computer science course for high school students. To complete the list, I help to hold InterLos, InterSob, and K-SCUK. All of these events are organized by people from Spolek přátel severské zvěře.
My out-of-school life
In my free time, I get fascinated with electronics, engineering, and technology in general. I have built many electronic gadgets to ease and complicate my life or just to have fun. Many of these projects are poorly documented, however, I am gradually making it better – I founded a personal blog, where I write about my projects and gained experiences. Also many of my new project can be found on my GitHub and my YouTube channel.
I design and build robots with my friends from Robotika Brno. Our robot Aranka has won RoboticDay. We also try to spread and share our know-how at RoboCamps. For that we build several interesting pieces of hardware: RBControl, its successor RBCX and we also explored dirt cheap motor encoders.
Recently, I got myself an MSLA 3D printer and this world amused me. These machines are powerful, but the technology is still lacking. I do not print mini-figures for Dungeons & Dragons, I want to print precise functional engineering parts on these printers. That’s why I started to R&D in this area – you read a lot about it on my personal blog. I am also part of the Photonsters group.
I know how to run a mill, lathe, I can program a CNC machine or control a laser cutter.
When I was at I high school, I wrote two thesis for SOČ – one about DIY build of wind turbine based on solid physical foundations and calculations; the second one about a design of a control system for a CNC machine, where I focused on non-trivial dynamics of the motions. But that’s a long time ago.
My active projects
- RoFI – Open-Hardware Self-reconfigurable robots
- KiKit – Automation for KiCAD
- PcbDraw – Make beautiful drawings of your PCBs!
- JlcParts – Catalog of components available for JLC PCB SMT assembly that isn’t painful to use
- Tuning of SLA printers – currently, I rebuilt Elegoo Mars and a similar thing is going to happen to Elegoo Saturn.