💾 Archived View for flatline.ro › logs › 2021-10-16.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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Friendship ended with server development, now hardware is my best friend.
It's been a little while, my dear gemlog. Two weeks to be exact. In the meantime I've become disillusioned with trying to learn Node.js streams and add all sorts of bells and whistles to this capsule. I spent a few hours splitting the server parts from the request handlers, improving spec compliance, and trying to emulate Express. It worked but all of it was flashing a big red flag with "over-engineered" written on it. It feels like such a waste of time to try to make sense of this backend development stuff with TypeScript screaming at me constantly, while I could be just creating stuff. 50 lines of JavaScript is more than enough for a static server, and that's all I really need. All that crazy talk of middleware and session handling is behind me.
My next shiny thing is a Raspberry Pi Zero. This thing is so cute! I got a soldering kit and added its GPIO header. It was scary at first on such a tiny board, but it went surprisingly well. Never too late learn. The smell of burning solder brought back memories of my dad fixing our communist era cathode-ray TV, and of 12 year old me performing board-saving surgery on my ZX Spectrum clone, my first and only computer in the house at the time. The Pi Zero I got is not a W though, so the only way to access it besides hooking up a monitor and keyboard is to jack in to the serial UART, so I made sure to also grab a PL2303 usb thingy. It's a weird sort of joy to see terminal text loading at such a low baud rate. I also added a transparent case to it which makes it look pretty sleek!
Of course an RPi Zero is kind of useless by itself when you already own its bigger brother and are serving all sorts of random stuff off it. Also breadboards are cool and all to get a feel for the thing, but they look like a goddamn temporary tangle of a mess. I wanted something permanent, and potentially useful. My shopping list also included: tiny prototype PCBs, capacitors, resistors, sensors, connectors. Basically I went all out, to create a stockpile of parts but also make something I've been itching for for a while. After a couple of hours of soldering and a sore back, I'm now the proud owner of a tiny sensor array. Hooked it up to my big Pi and it's now obediently logging data, drawing a graph of all sensors and serving it over http. Huge success! The next step is to get the Zero connected to the rest of the world, and have it handle the sensor array instead.
Wonder when this lingering smell of solder smoke will go away.