So, let’s dive in with no preamble.
How I publish
A spectacular fail again at regular blogging here is mostly down to me having not worked out a smooth quick way to add a blog post to this Hugo based site. And as a rod for my own back, there’s the issue of pulling up a picture for each post and… well this time enjoy a shot of Battersea Power Station, where I picked up the 13” M4 iPad I’m writing this on.
The process now is an experiment in using GitHub to maintain a new branch for a blog post, then updating that branch which should trigger Netlify to pick it up, build it, and deploy onto a magic preview site. The actual text gets edited here in Working Copy for now.
Pictures are managed with edits from Pixelmator Pro and possibly Photomator. The resulting image is just dropped into the GitHub repository and goes up with the branch.
The theory is that I should be able to blog from anywhere with GitHub access of some kind. We…… shall… see… because… well skip to the end for a spoiler.
(A note from the future: Never forget to turn off smart quotes and other “fancy input” nonsense when writing plain text, especially if your blog silently uses them in the values rather than discard them.)
It’s not a Cyberdeck
I’ve been assembling the core of my not-a-cyberdeck, a device which looks to mop up Cyberdeck design vibes without the “Oh it has to run on a built in battery” meme. In MY dystopian future we have power banks with USB-C and we power stuff off them. And wage war upon the heretics of USB-D.
So far, the core is assembled. An 8” DSI touch screen from WaveShare, an 8MB Pi5 on the back and riding that a Pineberry (now Pineboards) NVMe Hat with SSD. A rough case for hacky design has been printed; I’m looking at it sitting in portrait or landscape so some sensors will be needed. The Pi5 has a fun issue when embedding it in a box with the power button being on the PCB. I have some shiny switches to wire up to the unpopulated J2 pins on the 5 which should solve that problem.
Printing fun
So after getting used to my new BambuLabs X1C with neat AMS, I’ve become more ambitious with my printing and when I hit this model for a soldering kit case on the web, I just had to go for it. The result is this:
There’s a beefy powerbank hiding under the Omnifixo plate (Omnifixo rocks BTW for all those tricky holding things).
The BambuLabs AMS let me quickly print out the different colored bodies and inserts and well, now I really have to up my “designing things” game.
MakeMitcham pauses
Well, we ran three MakeMitcham events with a level of success but scheduling means we’re going to be skipping June, July and August and picking things up in September until we run out of 2024. In the interim I’m going to be turning my “Make it blink” talk into some slides and a selection of Pico W based demonstrators so folks can if they want, repeat the process.
If you need a making fix before then, try Makeroni’s HackWimbledon where we meet up around every two weeks and everyone is welcome to “Make, Create, Illuminate”.
Just a quick one
Not going to prattle on but that’s it for this week. All going well, this is going to be weekly (that’s the spoiler see, weekly pacing). See, I even got it written down. (Unfurls paper) “Breach hull, all die”. Close enough. See you all in a week.