Codepope's Development Hell

I got a Lidar and it’s been a daft experience as none of the ‘supplied’ software works with it…

Rebooting the blog again

And cripes, nearly out of September and where have we got to? Jupiter Too! After being gently prompted by a Tweet from @johnkennedyesq, I headed off to A2Heaven and acquired me a Jupiter II with expansion. This was about filling a Forth shaped gap in my youth. I was busy with 6502/Basic combos back then and only really discovered Forth when it was the boot control language for Sun SPARCstations (How Cool?

A quick item on Google's (deprecated but still there) QR code generating endpoint

May Be A Circle May comes around and I realise my intention to post regularly has been well, this is an embarassed look to the side. So what’s been going on in the various circles of development hell…. DoNotDisturb So the dnd project at add do not disturb (dnd) lights at the door to the office with a remote switch was both completed and dismantled. The project scope expanded to include a CO2, Temperature, and Humidity sensor which would pump stats into the MQTT broker while it also managed the lights.

An update on hacking three languages at the same time

A short weekly look at things on my radar

I was going through the drawers in the lab when I happened across a Kim Uno that I’d put together a long time ago. It’s an Arduino Nano emulating the 6502 at the heart of the Kim-1, one of the classic early microprocessor machines from the late 70s. The board is super bare bones, and with the arrival of a Flashforge Adventurer 3 it was time to get exercising the new printer to make the Kim Uno more finished and all boxed up.

So, what do you do with old Pi projects? I had a Pimoroni Keybow on the side and thanks to RedRobotics’ tiny Pico2Pi board, I had the chance to breathe life back into it by replacing the controller board. Drawing back the Keybow Back in the day, the original Keybow was an interesting little beastie. A 3x4 keyboard of clicky switches with RGB LEDs as a compact keyboard; add your own Raspberry Pi Zero underneath and use a bare metal Lua implementation to configure the keyboard to send codes.

The Dazzler boards have arrived in my Development Hell. These boards, from James Bowman’s Excamera, are a continuation of the Gameduino family of devices which strapped a GPU and a Touchscreen to an Arduino to make a more than functional, graphically rich hand held games device. With the Dazzler, James has taken the Gameduino-3X GPU and moved it to a standalone board which also has an FPGA programmed up to manage more of the work and generate an HDMI signal.