Categories
AR / VR HoloLens

Resoving Unity Scene Merge Conflicts with UnityYAMLMerge (Smart Merge) and TortoiseGit

When working on Unity HoloLens-projects in teams, sometimes merge conflicts in Unity scenes are unavoidable. Even though the Unity scene file format is text-based, the automatic merge of a standard GIT merge tool wouldn’t always correctly recognize the changes from different versions.

Luckily, Unity comes with a merging tool that is specialized on scene files: UnityYAMLMerge / Smart Merge. However, it’s not straight-forward to integrate into a workflow.

Categories
Smart Home

Improving User Experience for Public Transport Departure Monitor

The public transport departure monitor has been incredibly helpful – it dramatically cut down the waiting times at the bus stop, as it allows to leave the apartment exactly on time to reach the bus.

The setup is based on a Raspberry Pi with a simple LCD display. I’ve combined this with a motion detecting power plug, so that the Raspberry is only active when I’m in the entrance area of the apartment. As such, the energy consumption is minimal.

Categories
App Development Smart Home

Using Netgear Arlo Security-Cameras for Periodic Recording

The Arlo security camera by Netgear is one of the few cameras that doesn’t need a power supply, so is easier to use outdoors. The cameras have motion-sensing integrated and upload a short video sequence around the motion event to the Netgear backend. Great about the Arlo ecosystem is that this is possible with the free plan as well; you can access the recordings of the last 7 days already with the free basic plan.

For my use case, I wanted to also take periodic pictures / recordings. These can then later be stitched together for a time-lapse.