@javin_wittig

I made a desktop app that shows which satellites fly over any place on Earth in the next 48 hours and whether you can actually see them. You click a spot on the world map, or search for a place, and you get a list of passes with times, direction, brightness and the cloud forecast.

The hardest part was figuring out when a satellite is really visible. It has to be dark where you are, but the satellite still needs sunlight on it, so I had to check the sun’s position and Earth’s shadow for every pass. Estimating how bright each pass will be also took me a while. Getting the app packaged for Windows, Mac and Linux was harder than I expected too.

I’m proud that the app doesn’t just say “not visible” but tells you why, like too cloudy or the satellite is in Earth’s shadow. I also like the 3D globe view.

To test it: download the file for your system from the releases page, unzip it and start it. Windows and macOS will warn you because the app isn’t signed. The README explains how to open it anyway. The first click on the map takes a few seconds because the app downloads orbit data first.

I modeled the launch of the Artemis II rocket in Blender. One of the biggest challenges was creating the fire and smoke simulations, which I’m really proud of! The project also includes an interactive 3D website where I showcase my Blender scene.

I built a real-time Hand Tracker using a Raspberry Pi 4, two servo motors, and MediaPipe! It tracks my hand movement live through a camera and mimics it using a physical paper hand mounted on two servos.

The biggest challenge:
Running MediaPipe directly on the Pi 4 overheated it fast. To fix this, I now run MediaPipe on my PC. Now, the Pi streams the video feed to my PC, which calculates the coordinates and sends them back to the Rasperry PI,which then controls the two servos to mimic my hands movement.

What I’m proud of:
Solving the overheating issue using network streaming and seeing the mechanical hand follow my movements live! I also built a website:https://javinwittig.github.io/hand_tracker_website/

I made 3 Github Repos, one for the Rasperry PI, one for the backend on my PC, where MediaPipe is running and another for the website, which I hosted using Github Pages

I built a Python command-line application for managing personal finances. On first use, it creates a local account (username/password stored in a JSON file). Users can log custom income and expense transactions with a date, amount, category, and description, and generate summaries, total income, total expenses, and savings over a custom date range. All transactions are continuously saved to a CSV file. Everything you need to know about how to use it is explained in the README