Welcome to F97.BE!

Hello, I’m Erik Schmidt, a technologist, systems thinker, author, and lifelong builder of practical solutions. From my base in Eynatten, Belgium, I combine a formal education in Mathematics, Informatics, and Political Sciences with more than three decades of hands-on experience in IT, infrastructure, automation, monitoring, artificial intelligence, energy systems, and technical communication.

My work has always been guided by one central question: how can complex systems be made understandable, reliable, and useful in the real world?

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That question has followed me since Christmas 1982, when my parents gave me a Commodore 64 and my uncle brought me a ZX Spectrum from a trade show in the UK. That Christmas sparked a fascination with technology that never disappeared. I moved on to machines such as the Apple II, the Amiga, and later, during my university studies, larger systems such as the PDP-11. Programming in Assembler, Fortran, and Pascal taught me discipline, precision, and respect for constraints. Every byte counted, every clock cycle mattered, and nothing could be taken for granted. Those early lessons still shape how I build modern systems today. I remain, at heart, more of a Unix user than a Windows guy.

In 1989, while studying in Aachen, Germany, I helped build the German FidoNet. In a world of dial-up connections, DOS machines, and improvised infrastructure, we created a decentralized network where messages moved from node to node. It was an early practical lesson in resilience, distribution, community, and coordination, long before those terms became fashionable. Around the same time, I was also involved in Yuppie!, contributing technical documentation and learning that technology is never only hardware and code. It is also language, trust, documentation, and people working together.

For more than thirty years, I have worked on systems where reliability matters. My professional background includes critical infrastructure, alarm and monitoring systems, intelligent automation, custom hardware, ERP systems, renewable energy analytics, and AI-driven software. In these environments, failure is not an abstract concept. A small fault can cascade into operational, financial, or physical consequences. That experience has shaped my view of technology: systems must not only be clever, they must be dependable.

Early in my career, I designed the first generation of portable computers for the ABC measurement containers of Germany’s former Federal Office for Civil Protection. I later developed the first generation of signage computers for Munich Airport, powering the plasma displays used there at the time. Projects like these taught me that engineering is not about impressive specifications alone. It is about designing for operation, maintenance, fault tolerance, and reality.

One of my most meaningful collaborations was with my late business partner, Dr. Rein Scheele. Together we developed the AT Mobimeter (Abstract) for the Dutch Government, a usage-based vehicle taxation system that anticipated many of today’s debates about mobility, fairness, infrastructure, and sustainability. A change in government meant the system was never implemented, but many of the questions we addressed then have since returned with even greater urgency.

Alongside technical development, I have also worked extensively in sales, training, and business-facing roles. This gives me a dual perspective. I understand both organizational constraints and engineering realities. I can translate business goals into technical systems, and technical complexity into language that users, managers, and decision makers can understand. That bridge between strategy and implementation has become one of the defining features of my work.

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Today, my work spans several connected fields.

In my day job, I guide employees of an English company through the complexities of a custom ERP system. My role is not only to explain software, but to help people understand processes, workflows, dependencies, and consequences. Good training is not button pushing. It is structured understanding.

In parallel, I am developing NeuralWeave AI, my own AI image indexer and visual search engine. It is designed for professionals who value privacy, performance, and control. NeuralWeave uses modern vision models such as SigLIP and CLIP-like transformers to generate embeddings for similarity search, clustering, and semantic tagging across large image collections. The goal is a private, on-premise system that understands images visually without sending sensitive material to the cloud.

I also build systems for renewable energy, home automation, solar forecasting, and intelligent EV charging. My Fusion Forecast project combines physical irradiance models with machine learning to predict residential solar production more accurately and more robustly than either method could achieve alone. It blends physics, historical production data, weather data, adaptive calibration, and machine learning into a forecasting system that keeps learning from reality.

AI has become central to this work, but not as a black box or a magic layer. I use AI as an engineering tool, something that can recognize patterns, handle uncertainty, improve over time, and support better decisions. My models run on local infrastructure, often on small edge devices where speed, transparency, and reliability matter. For me, AI is most valuable when it becomes part of a dependable system, not when it replaces understanding.

This systems perspective also shapes my writing.

I am the author of books and long-form essays about technology, energy, infrastructure, resilience, and society. My book Strom als System examines electricity not as a simple commodity, but as an operating condition of modern life, a continuous process involving physics, grids, markets, regulation, control rooms, data flows, maintenance, reserves, and responsibility. My follow-up work, Gesellschaft unter Spannung, extends this view to resilience in highly connected societies. It asks how dependencies between energy, communication, transport, administration, digital platforms, and institutions create new vulnerabilities, and what kind of responsibility is needed to manage them. You can find more details on my books page: https://f97.be/buecher/.

I also maintain a growing Glossar zur Energieindustrie und Energiewende on f97.be. It began as supporting material for my writing and has developed into a large, free, ad-free, and openly accessible knowledge base for energy, grids, markets, storage, flexibility, hydrogen, heat, regulation, climate policy, system costs, and security of supply. The goal is not just to define terms, but to place them in context. Good terminology is part of good system understanding.

Across all these activities, one principle remains constant: technology only matters when it works in context. Code, hardware, data, markets, institutions, users, regulations, and incentives are never fully separate. They form systems. Understanding those systems is the first step toward improving them.

In short, I build end-to-end systems that work in the real world. From training AI models to wiring sensors, from teaching ERP workflows to deploying containerized APIs, from writing books to building forecasting systems, I focus on solutions that are practical, intelligent, transparent, and dependable.

I have also taken on the role of a Technology Evangelist, not in the sense of promoting technology for its own sake, but in showing what well-designed systems can make possible. Whether I am guiding a team through AI adoption, helping a business understand its processes, explaining energy infrastructure, or demonstrating what renewable energy and open tools can achieve, I enjoy being the bridge between innovation and people.

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On a personal note, I live in a solar-powered home with my artist wife and our daughter. We support local energy cooperatives and Ecolo, Belgium’s green party, because sustainability is not only a technical challenge. It is also a societal choice. Our solar installations, electric cars, and energy systems are not just projects. They are part of how we live.

Beyond technology, I collect vintage postcards and rare books. They preserve traces of forgotten places, people, and systems of everyday life. In that sense, they are not so different from code, archives, networks, or infrastructure. They contain patterns, context, memory, and meaning, waiting to be understood.