brainwagon

Totally amazeballs. I had goosebumps.

This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete version of these projects going forward. First of all, a new acquisition. My Anet A8 3D printer has proven to be, well, not the most reliable of gadgets. I still […]

I haven’t posted an update here recently, but I am (mostly) living up to my New Year’s resolution to spend at least 30 minutes a day working on a project. This has taken the form of some stupid but necessary chores (like fixing the broken pull cord on my lawnmower) but has mostly taken the […]

Several days ago, I cobbled together a short bit of code to make an NTP enabled clock out of an ESP32/OLED module. I had previously used an ESP8266 and a separate module to make a little demo that predicted the location of the ISS. I thought that the ESP32 would make a better development platform, […]

I often get nearly an hour and a half of commute time in my car each day, so I have lots of time. Rather than just waste it, I like to listen to podcasts or audio books. Recently I decided to subscribe to Audible, and started getting some interesting books. I had read The Making […]

I had a bunch of chores that I wanted to get done this weekend. Our gardener has disappeared off the face of the earth, and our front yard was looking ragged and weedy, so I decided to try to mow it myself. I have two mowers in my garage, a Black and Decker rechargeable electric […]

I spent a little time today trying to make the bare minimum code necessary for the ESP32 to connect to my WiFi network and synchronizing the time using NTP. It’s not really that amazing, but required a tiny bit of snooping around to figure out how to make it work. Archived here, just for fun. […]

Okay, I got it working. See! But I had a number of really annoying problems, none of which really had to do with the hardware: I installed it on a Pi3 I had lying around that previously had been running my 3D printer using Octopi. I tried to do an “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” […]

For some reason, I’ve always been attracted to E ink displays. They combine a number of interesting features like low power (none when not being refreshed), high contrast and a wide viewing angle. But they only recently have begun to get cheap enough to play with. The other day I was surfing around and discovered […]

I’ve been kind of interested in a type of “livecoding” where changes to a code base are immediately reflected in a running program. I’ve seen Inigo Quilez (author of the famed shadertoy.com) do this with a scaffold that he wrote using OpenGL. Literally as he types new shader code, the changed shader is loaded and […]

In addition to my geek hobbies, I have resurrected a skill that was taught to me by my Grandma Busch when I was seven years old: crochet. It began earlier in 2017, when Carmen wanted me a pussy hat so we could attend various protests and rallies. I told her I could knit or crochet […]

My previous entry talked about the problems that I’ve been having with the Anet A8. I haven’t had the time to actually do some rework of the connector (I should get to that later today) but while I was commuting I thought about it a bit, and was trying to answer the following questions. How […]

As in most things, whether you achieve success has a lot to do with what connections you have. And this is true of my somewhat unreliable Anet A8 3D printer more than most. My printer had been down for a month while I worked on getting a new hot end installed properly. It wasn’t so […]

If I was going to port my ISS code to the ESP32 using the ESP-IDF framework, I’d need a driver for the SSD1306 OLED display.  It does seem like some people have been down this path before.  I haven’t tried any of the following, but a little quick googling revealed some promising links: https://github.com/yanbe/ssd1306-esp-idf-i2c https://github.com/imxieyi/esp32-i2c-ssd1306-oled […]

Over the last year I’ve spent a small amount of money and a larger amount of time accumulating a bunch of development modules from banggood. This began mostly with me getting some spare Arduino modules cheaply. Whereas an official Arduino might cost you $25 or so from Adafruit or Sparkfun, you can get a Geekcreit […]