2021-12-26 from the editor of ~insom
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Happy Boxing Day (except that might be Monday because today
is Sunday).
/now = Rust, Microcontrollers, Introspection
Since I last posted I had success with reflowing a PCB. It
worked first time. The actual circuit is only okay, but
that's probably as much the microphone as it is the
amplifier.
I found the start of my vacation more relaxing. Not sure if
that's because I feel my time off ticking away or because
everyone else is off now too so we're doing more social
stuff (which is great but not always relaxing, per se).
Also I think I got too interested in too many diverse things
and wasn't making great progress on any:
I dug out the SDR I built after reading some posts by
~paultag. I decided that maybe it's finally time to learn
how to use GNUradio properly. I had a couple of mildly
frustrating evenings, picked up some very strong signal
(weakly) and have popped it all back into a box. Maybe next
year, Ham Radio!
After rescuing the display and writing off the motherboard
for my X131e I wondered if I could make it more useful by
putting Coreboot on there. I bought an SOIC-8 EEPROM
programmer and dumped the ROMs, which felt very "Hackerish"
tbh -- with a chip clip on the motherboard.
Anyway, even though Coreboot says it supports the X131e, it
actually only supports the Intel models, and mine is an AMD.
And that's how I learned that AMD support in Coreboot is
poor (mostly AMD's fault), and it's probably impossible for
me, as a casual contributor, to add support for my
motherboard.
I've written this little project off and will be selling the
salvagable parts on eBay.
I did put Coreboot on my Chromebook though, as I got a
notification it's going out of Google support and will no
longer receive updates, despite the fact that the hardware
is totally fine for most of the things someone would use a
Chromebook for, and it's a similar spec to many Chromebooks
you can literally buy new in the shops.
I also got to put BunsenLabs Linux on there, which is a
spiritual successor to Crunchbang, based on Debian.
I wrote a small utility for controlling two servo motors
connected to the hardware PWM on a Raspberry Pi. The modern
way of doing this (with kernel support and entries in
`/sys`) is so much nicer than poking registers as root was.
This is for Jack's and my drawing robot project.
All of these are distractions from the Rust + SFML stuff I
told myself I would work on! If you specialise in
everything, you specialise in nothing. I think this has been
subtly stressing me out -- which is a shame. Sometimes I'd
like to be the kind of person who just lets their fancy take
them places.
