SeTec Astronomy @SetecAstronomy@hackers.town

Just found a whole batch of Hackers.town people languishing in my Follow queue.

Locals should drop me a line when following so I can approve. Not currently accepting outside follows.

#Reintroductions? But I never did #Introductions...

I'm a weird guy who decided to base his profile on the movie Sneakers. I love technology, probably more than is healthy. My interests tend to revolve in a cycle but in the spirit of hackers.town I try to keep it to infosec and general internet nerdery.

I live with a migraine 24/7 so don't be surprised to see the occasional related toot.

Fun STA Fact #4 (collect them all!): A Canadian goose once attempted to carjack me.

Alas. It looks like the cc1101 library is not to be on Micropython. Part way through installing dependencies it failed because it couldn't allocate enough memory.

In it's defense, it appears to have been written with the Raspberry Pi in mind. Disk space is a little more common there.

I did however learn about rshell today. If that's not worth it's weight in gold, I dunno what is.

I just wish it hadn't taken me all day and a big hit to my blood pressure to figure out that I just needed to beat on the freaking button like it had just insulted my choice in fediverse instance.

Having looked at the schematic a bit, I suspect that Windows is defaulting one of the serial flow control lines to a different state than Linux is. And sadly there's no way to tell esptool.py to do anything with them at all.

Whatever. It has Micropython on it now. REPL is working. I am a few mere lines of Python away from having WebREPL working. Soon I shall rule the world!

Or something.

I'm not sure this project was a good thing for my mental state...

I really hope I don't have to flash this ESP32 very often. The only way I've been able to get it to work is to start esptool and then spam the reset button until I see it start.

The consensus amongst the devs is "it doesn't do that when you program it from Windows"

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I can see it counting up, 10s of kbs at a time. It only needs to download 125,719kb.

*wanders off to play Minecraft*

Not sure exactly where the bottleneck is, but Ardunio IDE downloading new board in Win7 VM is significantly slower than Arduino IDE downloading on host machine. The former is going to take so many minutes that I'm going to wander off and do something else. The latter happened so fast I barely had time to realize it happened.

There was a bit of easy to deal with stuff to clean up in the lab, so most of it's done, but oof. I'm in bad shape today. So I think I'll go play a game or read or something and hope it doesn't get worse.

I need to continue cleaning up the lab, but it's a struggle to keep going.

Much of what's left is the stuff that's not immediately obvious how or where to put it away.

The worst part is there is zero practical use for me. I just want to do it because I've wanted to do it forever.

It's radio stuff and I can't even do it over the air because licensing.

Help. This project in my head is getting out of control. It's going to need the entire bench, and some hefty test equipment that I put away, because it takes up some serious bench space.

And if it shows promise, I'd need to acquire a few more dummy loads...

I have a device with a most unusual power socket. At a glance it looks like an ordinary 5.5x2.5mm barrel socket, but it's not. It's narrower in one dimension. It will only accept a plug like the one in the image.

I have no idea where to find such a thing, or how to begin looking for it. I tried some searches. I tried looking through DigiKey's catalog.

This is a Panasonic portable television manufactured in 1984, so it's entirely possible no one makes such a plug anymore. I'd sure prefer to find one instead of replacing the socket.

The flat portion of the socket is 4mm wide, so I'm guessing the flat on the plug is something like 3.5mm. The center pin could very well be the smaller 2.1mm, especially after staring at that mockup I made. 2.5mm seems to be shaving it quite close.

I bet in the real thing only the rounded outer bits (and inner sleeve) were conductive. Not the flat part.

I think that perhaps instead of building another printer, I'd be better served to build a small CNC. I think something that can do PCBs and panels for custom enclosures would be useful.

I'll have to see how much table space I have left when the lab is moved.

If I clean *some* things off the bench, it's OK to start a new project and get out *all the things* right?

Hmm. Clean up the lab, or get *more* stuff out for a new project?

Don't be silly. Of course the first choice is always to start a new project.

The lab PC is better with my old video card in it, but it's still a giant pile of crap. I'm typing at a reasonable speed and I'm outpacing the text appearing in the textbox.

Kinda wish I had something decent to shuffle around and swap it out with. The best I could do is a 32-bit machine, and I'm not sure that'd be an improvement.

The printer is being a dingus. I'm pretty sure the issue at this point is not that the nozzle is too high. I suspect I just need to clean the bed rather thoroughly (again). I must have touched it and not realized it.

This iterative failure is getting to me. I need to solder something. Or maybe assemble one of those Lego/whatever kits that's sitting in the pile.

Sad that the lab expansion isn't going to have room for a model train layout.

I could, but then I wouldn't have the table for the 3D printers and other odd bits of stuff. I don't know that it's worth it.

I really want to do trains somewhere some day though.

Want to get into the lab, because otherwise I'm going to just sit here with my head in my hands and do nothing today. But my head is trying to murder me. Bleh.

Dreaming this morning. I see a sign in the distance. I want to read it but it's too far away. So I try to move closer, but there's resistance. So I force myself to move closer. It's all gibberish. "Oh yeah, I wasn't supposed to get close enough to read it, so my brain never took the time to come up with real words." I think, while still in the dream.

Brains are weird.

I figured out what to do with it.

What would I even do with it? But it's only $6 shipped, if I can wait a month...