Welcome to F97.BE!

Hello, I’m Erik Schmidt, a technologist, systems thinker, and author based in Eynatten, Belgium. I combine a formal education in Mathematics, Informatics, and Political Science with more than four decades of hands-on experience in IT, infrastructure, automation, monitoring, artificial intelligence, energy systems, and technical communication.

One question has guided my work from the start: how can complex systems be made understandable, reliable, and useful in the real world?

The early years

That question has been with 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 has never left me.

I started using computers before DOS and Windows became the default reference point for an entire generation. To me, computers were never beige office machines, but open systems to explore, understand, and bend into shape. From the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum I moved on to the Apple II and the Amiga, and later, during my university years, to larger machines such as the PDP-11.

My roots were always in systems that invited curiosity, exposed their inner workings, and rewarded those who wanted to understand what was really happening underneath. Those early lessons still shape the way I build today: they gave me a lasting appreciation for robust architecture, efficient code, and technology that remains understandable from the inside out. At heart, I am still more Unix than Windows.

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

Those years also marked my first steps in publishing. I wrote mainly about computers and digital technology for German publications including Amiga Magazin, taz, Aachener Zeitung, Aachener Nachrichten, and Klenkes. Writing for different audiences taught me how to make technical subjects accessible without losing their substance, a skill that has remained central to my work ever since.

Where reliability matters

For over three decades, I have worked on 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 conviction that 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 of government meant the system was never deployed, but 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 a defining feature of my work.

What I work on today

In my day job, I guide the employees of a UK-based 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 image indexer and visual search engine, designed for professionals who value privacy, performance, and control. NeuralWeave uses modern vision models such as SigLIP and CLIP-style 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 alone. It blends physics, historical production data, weather data, and adaptive calibration into a forecasting system that keeps learning from reality.

AI is central to this work, but never as a black box or a magic layer. I use it as an engineering tool: something that recognizes patterns, handles uncertainty, improves over time, and supports better decisions. My models run on local infrastructure, often on small edge devices where speed, transparency, and reliability matter. AI is most valuable when it becomes part of a dependable system, not when it replaces understanding.

Writing and publishing

The same systems perspective shapes my writing.

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. Its follow-up, 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 grown into a large, free, ad-free, and openly accessible knowledge base covering 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 of this, 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 promoting technology for its own sake, but showing what well-designed systems can make possible. Whether guiding a team through AI adoption, helping a business understand its processes, or explaining energy infrastructure, I enjoy being the bridge between innovation and people.

On a personal note

I live in a solar-powered home with my artist wife and our daughter. We support local energy cooperatives and the Belgian green parties Groen and Ecolo, because sustainability is not only a technical challenge. It is also a societal choice. Having always lived between languages, regions, and cultures, between Flanders and Wallonia, both parties feel like a natural political home.

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: patterns, context, memory, and meaning, waiting to be understood.