In August, I started working on what I thought would be a small, couple of hours project to make yet another diode matrix rework of the Ferris Sweep Half Swept for Seeed Xiao called Swoon. I hoped to make a flippable, hand-solderable version that could be produced as cheaply as possible, and a version that could be fully assembled by the board house.
Last fall, my 3d printing processes came unhinged. I was preparing to take on some explorations in clay, and I prudently decided to begin by ripping both of my printers completely apart. Through the years, my printers' chassis had become a hodgepodge of transformers, buck converters wrapped in heatshrink tube and level shifters: I needed to find clarity.
While looking up the conversation about using ADXL345 as a probe for the piezo article, I stumbled on jniebuhr/adxl345-probe from summer 2024.
I bought a TS80P a few years ago, and it has been my trusty soldering companion ever since. Despite my rough handling—using it for heat set inserts and even melting bearings into PLA—the iron has held up remarkably well. However, my main B02 tip had become so oxidized that only a tiny corner could be tinned. I feared I might need a new tip, but after soaking it in a halved lemon for several hours, scraping it periodically with the coarse side of my sponge, heating and wiping it with a brass brush, and repeating the lemon treatment, it was back to a fully tinnable state.
I think I may be the only person who likes using toolboards with delta printers, but I find it really convenient to change between different tools, and for media that is less physically stable (clay), it just seems like the right kinematic system. I had been using a QQ-S Pro for many years, but when I started working with clay more last year, I wanted something with a stiffer frame. When I found the SR on mega sale over the last winter holiday, I snapped up a couple.
It has been 7 months since my last re-homing Home Assistant article. In the time since, I've re-homed it twice more, and it seemed worth making a few notes. At this point, it's fair to say my Home Assistant install is more of a vagabond, constantly searching for warm (but not too warm!) hardware to inhabit in the night...
Last fall, I had considered setting up multiple instances of Klipper on a single machine. I ultimately went with a dedicated SBC for each printer, though, mainly for resilency, but also because I dreaded writing the udev rules for the can interfaces.
Nary a month on the heels of my writing about the Radxa Zero 2 Pro, I'm delighted to report I've received the Radxa Zero 3w. Setup couldn't have been easier—in just over a week, I managed to find and install an operating system.
The week before last, I won the sbc lottery. I happened onto the allnet website during the brief moment when the Radxa Zero 2 Pro was available. I ordered 2. They arrived in record time, exceeding their estimated delivery by half a week.
It's not unimaginable to hypothesize that for many people, the number of hours spent typing is the largest percentage of time spent moving a part of their body. When put this way, it's surprising that we don't have typing networks where we watch people type as spectators like soccer or rugby. Maybe this is the true joy of gaming tournaments. As a middle-aged person, I will spend, on the low end, another 41,600 hours of my life typing should I live an average lifespan.
This summer, I overhauled my blinds, upgrading the nodemcus to Xiao esp32c3s so I could run the more modern version of Tasmota on them, and start testing out matter. It worked really well (I think I had procrastinated upgrading because of the costs of esp32, but it's gotten so much cheaper now than it was a couple of years ago). Which got me thinking: could I install a zigbee chip on one of my blinds and use zigbee2tasmota to expose them over matter, thus eliminating HomeAssistant? I installed z2t and was surprised at how well it worked with my lights, but the berry scripts to expose zigbee endpoints aren't done yet. (It is on the road map so I'll definitely keep an eye on it as the project develops.)
The world of single board computing is alive right now. Like Julie Andrews spinning on a grassy hilltop, if you're willing to go down the rabbit hole, you'll might come out singing. The 'chip shortage' of the past few years has left many people (myself included) a lot more willing to experiment than they might otherwise have been. Internet sentiment evidences a community that is a strange mix of excited, annoyed (the comments on this article), and somewhat unsettled. I can't wait to see what another year or two brings as people respond to what's going on in this space.
Exploring layouts for my new keyboard and decided to give the Engram Layout by Arno Klein a go.
Last week, I decided to have an affair with the text editor of my youth: Vim. No matter how thoroughly I work to assimilate a command's syntax, I always have to refresh after some time away.
When I used to use Atom, there was a great collaborative writing tool called Teletype. It allowed multiple people to be editing the same files at the same time. I've been working on a book lately and wanted to get another one in progress with a group of authors, so I tried to find something that would duplicate Teletype's functionality iThonically.
A few weeks ago, I happened onto MWeb and everything changed. MWeb has a great preview, a good library that integrates well with its desktop version, and allows easy editing of files in external folders, including the git repository that hosts this site.