HN user
And a crazy good social safety net. If you're having any sort of difficulty(ranging from depression to bankruptcy), you'll get adequate state support(income, subsidised housing and healthcare) for a long time. I wonder why more people don't start businesses there, given that it's seldom fatal to risk and fail..
"Being surrounded by PhD when you're only a grad"
Same thing is happening to me, just started my PhD in one of the leading robotics labs, and I feel like I don't belong there. It's beginning to cause insomnia and depression, or symptoms of those.
"I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that there is already a very large market of people who like to tinker with cars. Imagine a self-driving Delorean"
Or my own version, a level 3-ish self-driving 1977 VW Rabbit :)
"You can refuse to compromise on your rates, provided that you can afford to walk away if necessary" I also wanted to move away from so-called freelancing, but in the end I discovered that it gives me incredible flexibility: I now cherry-pick my clients, taking only projects that are challenging and truly stimulating. I charge a very high hourly rate but I also put my soul into the project, and in the end the clients are more than happy with the work. This allows me to work for ~4 months/year(in blocks, of course), and the rest of the year is spent on personal projects, travelling and building (self-driving)race cars. Try to find your niche and go for it, it's really worth trying!
That's exactly what I'm thinking, but it will take 1-2 months, right now I'm 1400 km away from that stuff.. Stay tuned, I guess.
Made an autonomous vehicle out of a VW Golf/Rabbit, in around 2 weeks.
Custom built hardware, including the actuators.
Custom built RTOS on micro nodes.
Driving via openCV, hough transforms for lane detection, stereovision and flows for obstacles, surf/etc for traffic signs(don't ask, I was learning)on a stack of 2 laptops connected via gigabit ethernet.
Nicest thing: I got the models trained mainly without moving the car, by pumping the framebuffer of two racing/car games, rFactor and GTA3 through glcs to openCV and controlling the games via uinput to make a virtual city to drive in.
Don't have a lot of pics, here's some HW:
http://imgur.com/9cfzbMv ( yes, that's an old cordless drill and an angle grinder head with a bespoke bike chain :) )
http://imgur.com/5x9T9gi (piston is weirdly offset so I could still put my foot on the brake in emergencies, like that one time i smashed it into a fence...)
http://imgur.com/Ig7MaLT (notice how I kept the costs down to almost nothing, in this case the air distributor for the brakes made with Meccano and old air valves and a geared motor, since I didn't have the funds to buy anything)