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2021-12-26

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.