About
Janne Stiefel.
I'm in the fourth semester of my Mechanical Engineering bachelor at ETH Zürich. The Innovationsprojekt in my third semester — a team build where we designed and shipped a line-following robot that had to accomplish certain tasks within a time limit, in just a few months — got me into robotics, and I've been chasing projects ever since. I enjoy the software side as much as the mechanical work; most of what's on this site sits at that intersection.
Skills
Mechanical & hardware
- Mechanical design & CAD — Onshape
- 3D printing — design-for-print, iteration
- Subsystem design — drills, drivetrains, actuators
- BLDC motors, servos, motion hardware
Robotics & embedded
- ROS2
- Embedded development — ESP32, Arduino
- NVIDIA Jetson (Orin Nano) — deployment, edge compute
- Sensors, motion control, real-time loops
- Autonomy stacks — voice control, Whisper, YOLO, local LLMs (Ollama)
Software & product
- Python — robotics, ML glue, scripting
- Mobile — React Native / Expo
- End-to-end product build — solo shipping from idea to launch
- Full-stack web — Astro, Tailwind
Ways of working
- Small-team engineering
- Solo end-to-end builds
- Cross-domain integration — mechanical, electrical, and software in one project
Outside of work
I love sailing and sports. In February 2026 I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean.
I rowed competitively for five consecutive years. Among other medals, I took silver in the coxed men's eight and bronze in the coxed men's four at the German Rowing Championship.
I play guitar, classical and electric. I played in my school's band growing up, and still play in Zürich.