“Well, that’s gone exactly to plan.”, he said shuffling through the papers in the organisational disaster area that was his desk. “Now, just have to find that plan to verify that observation.”
A plan was never found. That said he settled down to note what had been happening:
Make Mitcham
The Makeroni/HackWimbledon story has now expanded to include beginner sessions at Mitcham Library once a month. Make Mitcham is an offshoot of HackWimbledon and is where folks new to the idea of coding and making can come to get a taster. Unlike HackWimbledon there is an agenda, and some idiot talking about how to make things (LEDs, Neopixels and OLEDs) blink, which leads off into talking about all sorts of stuff around microcontrollers and how you can use them. Each blinker is physically illustrated with a breadboarded Pico. That’s all followed by some hands-on experimenting with Microbits for a decent little kickoff. More details on the Merton Libraries site and on the Makeroni Meetup page.
We already had the first Make Mitcham so the format is all worked out. Of course I now have to make up some slides so others can also run the event. Back to the todolist.
Big Switch
Also on my todolist, I got my hands on one of those Kalih Big Switches. I’ve found a nice printable case for it to live on, pulled out a Pico W and will likely slap in some neopixelly sparkles. I’m thinking of configuring it to remote deploy for special occasions, but it is challenging thinking up a single button app. Even the old Cheeky Big Red Button had two inputs (one triggering when you opened the lid, the other when you press the button).
Turing Pi progress
So, after getting a load on 8GB CM4 Lites and assembling the Turing Pi 2, it was all a bit of a kludge. No NVMe support for the CM4 means haning many SATA drives off it and running in a weird SD-CARD/slow drive combo. That all changes when the RK1 boards landes. These ready to roll boards for the TP2 go straight in, work with NVME SSD’s, rock 32GB of RAM and in the process of installing them, I rehoused the entire TP2. Now I have a monster cluster ready for my next step, turning it into a AI/Compute cluster for chewing through data. Next stop is getting it Kubernetes smart (and get some ARM Postgres on board it).
Go vs Rust
Talking about Postgres, I’ve been trying an experiment while learning me some Rust, writing the same app (a Postgres table viewer for quick monitoring) in Go and Rust. Well, I say that, but the Go has come pretty easy to me even if I am pulling in packages and doing Go code that I’ve not done before… that’s all come together with a basic proof of concept. The Rust on the other hand is like pulling teeth. The cliff of concepts in Rust is a hard wall to climb and unlike a lot of languages I’ve grokked in the past you need to climb that wall to get anywhere. Still, loving the Rust compiler’s error messages… almost always actually helpful. More on all that going forward.
Well, that’s it for now. Oh, this is also an experiment in how I post. The friction has been quite high to date. Let’s see how this goes…
Cheesy title image by Bing AI. Next time, I think some randophoto of some hardware. 🤪