@EvanGan – Hack Club Scrapbook

Wed, Sep 25

Got a slack bot downtime notifier working! Going to integrate it with past projects tomorrow & continue with my slack bot template/toolkit.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/7bc8568f-d8dd-48a9-92af-39c8862a1182-screenshot_2024-09-24_at_9.02.42___pm.png

Sun, Sep 22

Today I put my pronoun counter on github after cleaning up the code a bit and writing some instructions up. You can find it here. I also started working on a slack bot template for typescript but faced some odd errors I had never seen before that were not happening on a copy of the code.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/63e90ff2-5ce8-4ed6-b01b-18492a5977eb-screenshot_2024-09-22_at_7.17.52___pm.png

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Sun, Sep 22

Worked on my pronoun counter today & got some results! I wouldn't say they are conclusive as nearly 4/5ths of the folks on slack have unset pronouns, but interesting none the less. If anybody's curious/wants to see the code I use for this I'm happy to put it up on GitHub, it just needs a bit of cleaning.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/bc7d194e-a69e-483d-a5ff-85dca7ed2803-screenshot_2024-09-21_at_10.11.39___pm.png

Sat, Sep 21

Yesterday I revised my script to grab all user ID's on slack to sort them by most recently updated profile because join date was not accessible with the method I was using to get the ID's. I also wrote a script to grab the pronouns from each ID I got previously which I ran overnight because it took 11 hours to run due to slack's rate limits & I had to preform an individual request for every user, all 49663 of them. Here's a list of all the slack ID's in slack as of yesterday if you want:

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/1dde720b-4810-4769-9bde-07e6e5b5c381-screenshot_2024-09-21_at_9.39.18___am.png

Fri, Sep 20

Started work on a little project to analyze everyone's pronouns on the slack just out of curiosity. So far I have all 49605 slack ID's for all the users. Got to setup a github at some point.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/6c8dcfbe-c2e0-4af4-b2c7-62b0a5fff1a1-screenshot_2024-09-19_at_5.51.44___pm.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/84f3168e-10cb-4f20-8375-72eb8f48c7dd-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/13de4b16-6914-4159-b10c-db600268bc54-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/36717eda-8429-48ee-8cf1-876119b523c6-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/f55cd879-f263-433f-85b3-16181d147308-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/16b14318-68eb-4f88-8a95-fee8e5f2ffc8-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/8b7dca32-c0e4-47bf-96ce-8a664d90d65a-trailstickers.png

Wed, Jul 17

Day 152 Still on the trail, climbed one mountain today and had lunch on top and am climbing another right now! inreachlink.com/ZKAEP5Z

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/c4baed8d-52d2-4a7d-94bb-c5f3a2b8d290-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/add8e40a-610c-442e-9460-ccd0d252f416-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/7908d2c4-954c-47cc-86de-ea6c0fac7eac-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/3f4b5445-8f44-4f12-bf0b-6e035a9542a1-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/93372b83-6d5f-442e-b010-d2a7772bf299-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/82792390-539b-4225-8533-8012ba8d2d8f-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/41de1fd2-1ec5-42ea-a561-c3c91a648a20-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/29eb0007-4f52-4483-b5b0-8259e2b507a5-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/e40a8989-206a-495f-8cc6-14edded7d346-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/acd50517-29bb-4468-99be-e0e74993f099-trailstickers.png

Tue, Jul 16

Day 151 On the trail, taking it pretty slow today. Lots of nice weather & views! inreachlink.com/G3BCCSZ

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/49f2988d-81b2-47b9-a841-dcd066940d9a-trailstickers.png

Mon, Jul 15

Day 150 On the trail, Lots of thunder and a bit of lightning last night and light showers this morning. Fortunately we are all safe. Currently on a mountain! inreachlink.com/CJQNE5B

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/0ae8667a-ff0c-4a6c-a63b-6a53de9d13dd-trailstickers.png

Mon, Jul 15

Day 150 On the trail, Lots of thunder and a bit of lightning last night and light showers this morning. Fortunately we are all safe. Currently on a mountain! inreachlink.com/CJQNE5B

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/fe05a4bf-1a4e-4bc7-97c5-05634e9897cb-trailstickers.png

Mon, Jul 15

Day 150 On the trail, Lots of thunder and a bit of lightning last night and light showers this morning. Fortunately we are all safe. Currently on a mountain! inreachlink.com/CJQNE5B

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/109aea90-746b-4049-af38-885903f5207f-trailstickers.png

Mon, Jul 15

Day 150 On the trail, Lots of thunder and a bit of lightning last night and light showers this morning. Fortunately we are all safe. Currently on a mountain! inreachlink.com/CJQNE5B

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/36d281da-7773-40aa-9c98-e929740c8d29-trailstickers.png

Mon, Jul 15

Day 150 On the trail, Lots of thunder and a bit of lightning last night and light showers this morning. Fortunately we are all safe. Currently on a mountain! inreachlink.com/CJQNE5B

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/d2f16cde-aae4-40e3-8924-27f385a64c5c-trailstickers.png

Sat, Jul 13

Day 149 On the trail today, saw some spectacular sights and got to the top of a small mountain. Had some rain last night but everything is going pretty well! inreachlink.com/V5DUNLB

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/24dbdfb7-7e90-4562-8e51-84c00cc3f5e1-trailstickers.png

Sat, Jul 13

Day 148 Today I traveled to the trailhead & got setup. Currently waiting on a few things to head out. inreachlink.com/P6ZNTRR

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/82fa13c2-13d7-41fa-ae43-bfef02fb84bd-trailstickers.png

Sat, Jul 13

Day 148 Today I traveled to the trailhead & got setup. Currently waiting on a few things to head out. inreachlink.com/P6ZNTRR

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/9dbc100c-3e3e-429e-ab37-bd13ed7ebaac-trailstickers.png

Sat, Jul 13

Day 148 Today I traveled to the trailhead & got setup. Currently waiting on a few things to head out. inreachlink.com/P6ZNTRR

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/9de14944-38aa-49c6-b07c-ed483e821e7d-trailstickers.png

Fri, Jul 12

Day 148 The Trail begins! I spent my entire day traveling to Reno. Lots of nice views!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/2fefa3ab-8d67-4ab1-98e7-fc2b693dded5-img_20240711_130116953.jpg

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/f253bbb0-97e4-445b-8bae-1250edec8438-img_20240711_170350481.jpg

Wed, Jul 10

Day 147 Today I wrote a little script I am going to give my parents to send updates to slack while I am on the trail!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/a28f8b90-4e3c-4887-8ca5-7832adedffd1-codescreenshot.png

Wed, Jul 10

Day 146 Today I setup a message bridge from a satellite text messenger to a slack channel & implemented a smaller font for my group's trail project with lots of help from @iUnstable0! We can now display 21 letters per line vs 16. Here's the code if you want to check out the finished project

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/75ff87a5-9971-418d-bd5f-e811f570471b-img_20240709_144441344.jpg

Tue, Jul 9

Day 145 Today I went sailing and did some more testing of my trail groups board and managed to transmit half a mile with obstacles like cars and trees. I also did a test pack of my bag for the trail and everything fit! I found some neat cheap vacuum bags which helped reduce the size of everything

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/5f0efc3c-9084-4768-b88b-210133ca8d1b-img_20240708_205705928.jpg

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/fcc738c2-668d-4f40-a265-606e1c5dd9c1-img_20240708_210708203.jpg

Mon, Jul 8

Day 144 Today I worked on my trail groups backup code. I implemented persistent history meaning if the board loses power or if you shut it off you retain your messages history, and custom usernames so you can now set your username. If you're interested, feel free to check out the github!

https://imgutil.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/da2240ffcced50752f11439d64fed620ed33f794a5e24e562a2120c3bf88b547/ee215a6b-2e0c-4ac2-b6ff-740be90366f2.png

Sun, Jul 7

Day 143 Today I departed from my stay at HQ. I had a great time & met some awesome folks! On the 5 hour bus ride back I worked more on the backup board software for my group's trail project.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/f915436e-7733-4ee2-9383-ce96524532d0-img_20240706_130554506.jpg

Sat, Jul 6

Day 142 Today I got an old version of my groups trail project working and made it event based so no computations are done if nothing's happening. I also tested with fellow group members and the range was pretty far. We walked out about 3 minutes from one board and we're still receiving messages.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/bc7f2c5c-a7ae-4c2a-89d8-9dbc4683b16a-img_20240705_153532845.jpg

Fri, Jul 5

Day 141 Today I worked more with @iUnstable0 and got some more board software done for our group's trail project.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/f3732032-3f82-4e6f-9276-89a804496f18-img_20240704_204613314.jpg

Thu, Jul 4

Day 140 Today I visited HQ and helped with the blot kits & worked on my magic 8 ball jam. I also got to play with @Micha's arcade edition e-fidget! Currently on the bus to fireworks because Burlington celebrates the 4th of July on the 3rd.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/db9de7fc-5591-4fcb-b52e-e3fef0344ad3-img_20240703_124330500.jpg

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Wed, Jul 3

Day 139 In transit! Today I took the greyhound bus 5 hours to HQ & got settled in the dorms. Got to meet @iUnstable0 & worked on some board stuff.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/3dfdd86a-bf4a-47e9-bf6d-d614c495b0f8-img_20240702_180357726.jpg

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Tue, Jul 2

Day 138 Went sailing today & packed for my visit HQ tomorrow. I put together a bin of bin parts to take with me to tinker with! I decided to also do a bunch of software updates and backups in order to be able to transfer all of my data to a newer old computer which ended up taking six+ hours and counting. Wasn't able to make any progress on other projects.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/fda4d2f2-c6ed-4b9d-9af9-477730d97795-img_20240701_175930097.jpg

Mon, Jul 1

Day 137 Today was mostly consumed by traveling home, but I managed to setup a few shell scripts to configure my website autodeploy from github system. It sort of works, still got some more troubleshooting to do tomorrow. I also made a sign for a fellow hack clubber who I am picking up at the airport tomorrow!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/f4f3c38e-9d65-44a3-8975-533ad10f19ac-welcome_to_boston_dino.png

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Sun, Jun 30

Day 136 Today I added some finishing touches to my autodeploy from github system! Among other things (like a bit of garbage collection), I implemented rate-limiting to prevent spam. Before I #ship it I am going to figure out how to get it running without me connected to the server it is running on and share the IP with folks of slack to see if they can find any security vulnerabilities. Here is the github if you would like to poke around in the code: github.com/evan-gan/githubAutoPull/tree/apiDevelopment

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/ff8455db-77d8-406d-93ef-d4c94eb074d9-screen_shot_2024-06-29_at_9.55.45_pm.png

Fri, Jun 28

Day 135 Today I troubleshooted the keyboard code for my group's trail board & got it working!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/99eb93b4-ca55-442b-9900-7e67afc82de3-img_20240628_183808692.jpg

Fri, Jun 28

Day 134 Today I soldered my trail group's boards with @ElliotShumsky & @ky200617. I also started some testing which I have yet to finish.

Thu, Jun 27

Day 133 Today I did lots of logistics, received the pcbs from jlc, and worked on my GitHub Auto deploy software more and got it to a semi-working state. See video for more info.

Wed, Jun 26

Day 132 Made lots of progress today! I finally figured out how to get everything up and running on a free VM and did lots of debugging. You can see my current code here.

https://imgutil.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/262c70934e4fc322d209b2ba86e8e63f2ed74740074e619c5b0bb997ff21f5f6/de4ffe9c-5455-47e9-958a-51251ab0d45c.png

Tue, Jun 25

Day 131 Today I didn't make much progress on my projects, but I started updating a code repository for my robotics team into the current year's librarys (they update all of them each season). I have 56 file waiting to commit once I finish. I also got parts from LCSC for the trail!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/06f2e816-b447-46a6-981c-0f1b5a6239cf-img_20240624_212640857.jpg

Mon, Jun 24

Day 130 Today I tried to test my github autodeploy code. I first got to install git, node, and npm onto a free oracle VM I have running and cloned the code to the server. After that I played around with it, updating node among other things to try to get it to work. I think I have to reconfigure the firewall, but don't want to do it today while I am tired because I could screw something up. On another note, my group's trail PCB is about to ship from JLC! We should have everything need to assemble our boards in 3-5 days.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/b98f750e-c73f-4c7a-8ebc-6b7fb230a9bd-screen_shot_2024-06-23_at_9.17.45_pm.png

Sun, Jun 23

Day 129 || 15 of #15-days-in-public! Today I worked for what felt like five hours on getting my microcontroller to decide to send IR signals. Finally after lots of googling & almost giving up, I figured out how to send signals! After I got that working I wrote some calibration functions and determined the number different colors of my lights could display (19863 or 27^3). Then I implemented some interpolation functions so I can smoothly transition between any two colors with as many steps as I would like. Here is the code if you would like to try it on your LED light strips: github.com/evan-gan/RGB-light-strip-controller If you want to learn more I recorded a video with details (it's to large for scrappy but you should be able to view the link)

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/91ca9cf2-2726-475c-99e9-f105dffdb533-img_20240622_222235006.jpg

Sat, Jun 22

Day 128 || 14 of #15-days-in-public Today I started a mini waking light project where I am using a pi pico to turn on and off some strip lights I have behind my bed in order to simulate the sun and wake me up. More info in video (scrappy didn't like how large it is).

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/1d7b7406-0f01-48b7-a3dc-0f582943bc24-img_20240621_220726472.jpg

Fri, Jun 21

Day 127 || 13 of #15-days-in-public Got 17 pi picos in the mail today, and some sensors/transmitters for a waking light project I plan to do for the last 2 days of #15-days-in-public. I also worked on my github auto deploy system & am approaching completion. I used Express to serve static files & host a webhook for github. If you are interested you can find the code here. My group's trail PCB is 33% of the way through PCB assembly!

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/9b119cf2-f664-416e-a98f-d64c43a76391-screen_shot_2024-06-20_at_9.51.52_pm.png

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/3ec2f9ac-5f3f-4726-949a-f1b2fd298232-img_20240620_214729553.jpg

Thu, Jun 20

Day 126 || 12 of #15-days-in-public Today I went sailing, visited a hardware store to get some wood for my group's trail project cover, and lots of organizational/logistics stuff. I was going to work on my github auto deploy project for hack hour, but never found an uninterrupted hour to do it. I think I might take a break from hack hour so I can make more progress.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/e4aea359-68fe-49a7-810c-e1adf8633564-img_20240619_172052369.jpg

Wed, Jun 19

Day 125 || 11 of #15-days-in-public Orders orders orders! Today I finally sat down and ordered basically everything for the trail! I also worked more on my github auto-deploy system & attempted to implement a file server system, took a bit longer than I expected. Still a work in progress.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/2bd9a3d3-e42d-4f64-b901-b484ff433921-screen_shot_2024-06-18_at_2.32.06_pm.png

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/4b9a44d8-f2e3-4c26-8a90-44d67f2c42ff-screen_shot_2024-06-18_at_7.22.36_pm.png

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Tue, Jun 18

Day 124 || 10 of #15-days-in-public I got my Magic 8 Ball PCB! Still waiting on bin parts, but once they arrive it should work. I also worked more on my github auto pull project, more info in video. github.com/evan-gan/githubAutoPull/tree/main

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/e56e2464-a1ae-4f04-a2c2-55826745babb-img_20240617_173638123.jpg

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Mon, Jun 17

Day 123 || 9 of #15-days-in-public Today I worked on a github auto-deploy system so I can push files to github, and have them update on a live instance. I plan to redirect requests once the server downloads all the files from github in order to achieve zero downtime. More details in the video.

Sun, Jun 16

Day 122 || 8 of #15-days-in-public Today I worked on code for my FRC team, code for my group's trail project, and worked with @iUnstable0 to figure out a design for the back of our group's trail PCB. While we were looking for stuff to put on the board in the trail sticker Figma, we found some interesting ways people created the stickers.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/458ce8d7-cc7f-475a-8351-b1e92951a460-screen_shot_2024-06-15_at_9.07.12_pm.png

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/4c1be844-1f51-47bb-957a-3d856773ae5f-screen_shot_2024-06-15_at_8.07.16_pm.png

Sat, Jun 15

Day 121 || 7 of #15-days-in-public Today I started looking into how to create an API so I can setup a webhook to update a deployed website from source in github. I also started looking into A-Frame and created a hello world project.

Fri, Jun 14

Day 120 || 6 of #15-days-in-public Today was a bit of a nightmare, where I spent 13 hours at school 3 of which taking an impossible to pass test. Aside from that, I started getting back into slack bots, and think I may build one out. Today I also learned how to create github actions so I can make a website that updates from a github repository.

https://scrapbook-into-the-redwoods.s3.amazonaws.com/1843086c-d97c-45d2-977a-5aeacae56dcd-screen_shot_2024-06-13_at_9.32.43_pm.png

Thu, Jun 13

Day 119 || 5 of #15-days-in-public Today I added mounting holes to my trail group's PCB, talked case design with @ElliotShumsky, and got my CS teacher to run @zrl's rug(now haunted house) game workshop during class.

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Wed, Jun 12

Day 118 || 4 of #15-days-in-public Today I spent a few hours adjusting the layout of my group's trail board to make it smaller and hopefully look better. We still need to add some attachment holes but otherwise we should be set for a production run! Anyone have ideas for what we should add for the silkscreen?

Tue, Jun 11

Day 117 || 3 of #15-days-in-public Started a big media project about asking questions for school today which ate up a lot of my time. I checked my Magic 8 Ball's production progress and found none.

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Mon, Jun 10

Day 116 || 2 of #15-days-in-public Today I worked with @krisk and cleaned up our group's trail project by separating every "sub-system" into it's own file in order to make it so we can work on it async better.

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Sun, Jun 9

Day 115 || 1 of #15-days-in-public I ordered my Magic 8 Ball board! I also hopped on a call with my trail group and braved integration hell, but made lots of progress. We verified our board can run on battery power and jerry rigged LoRa antenna to the board after we found JLCPCB did not assemble the antenna mount. We had some very cursed issues that magically went away when we made the LED on the pico blink in random parts of the code. It works now & we shipped it!

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Sun, Jun 9

#the-trail Ship! During the trail there will be no internet, so no slack. Now you can no longer talk to fellow hack clubbers over long distances. Introducing: The Trail Meshenger, your one stop shop for long range communications in the middle of nowhere. With our board you can send messages to your peers using a full keyboard, receive messages from afar that have been bounced to you via LoRa meshing, and scroll through history to view all your messages. (@iUnstable0, @krisk, @Cosmin, @ElliotShumsky, & I collaborated to make this possible!) Github: github.com/evan-gan/trail-PCB-communication-network/tree/boardCode Board design: oshwlab.com/iunstable0/the-trail-radio Case CAD (WIP): cad.onshape.com/documents/7d93d61a31602b768ed96068/w/1cf309bd2eb8c3aacfd3fdcc/e/20b88007a995c31551fb8c04

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Sat, Jun 8

Day 114 Not much to do today. I am currently waiting on things for the two main projects I am working on so I decided to try to get a head start on a little (5 minute) documentary I am doing for school about a biological control project (introducing one species of bugs to get rid of another) in a park near me that ended up half working with the bugs introduced to solve the issues becoming dominate. Unfortunately, my footage got mostly corrupted due to the recording setup I had. Going to try again tomorrow.

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Thu, Jun 6

Day 113 2 days until #15-days-in-public! Lots happened today, @iUnstable0 got the trail PCB we designed, I played around with display code for our board some more and got stuff working, and I finished & submitted an onboard PR for the Bin -> OnBoard jam I am working on. Nothing blew up on the trail board when we powered it on!

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Thu, Jun 6

Day 112 Played around more with getting a display going in wokwi with micropython with success! I also started writing some message splitter code so longer messages can be displayed.

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Tue, Jun 4

Day 111 Today I wrote my first python hello world program & setup a figma for education account using #temp-email because my personal one did not work. I also played with @Tom's sandbox simulation which was really fun!

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Mon, Jun 3

Day 110 Today I used Chat GPT to give me a crash course Python. It was so helpful I got it to make a nice webpage for it & I put it up on my Github pages. I also spent a while on coordinating trail stuff. evan-gan.github.io/quickStart/python.html

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Mon, Jun 3

Day 109 More Battle Cry @ WPI (offseason FRC comp) today! The alliance my team was on managed to get fifth place out of 16 alliances in the playoffs. My team announced RoboCon NE, a first robotics conference we are hosting this coming September. On our way out I passed some food delivery robots charging which I thought were neat.

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Sun, Jun 2

Day 108 Today I attended Battle Cry @ WPI and got to drive my team's robot for a match and be human player for two matches! When I got home I found two packages from Hack club, one for Hack Hour and the other for Boba.

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Sat, Jun 1

Day 107 The day is prime! Today I saw two separate cyber trucks on the road for the first time, quite odd looking cars. In other news, I sat down and made lots of progress on my PCB for the bin -> onboard jam, getting a basic schematic (for my magic 8 ball) done, and turning it into a layout for a PCB.

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Fri, May 31

Day 106 Today I troubleshooted a project for my CS class after writing code for about a month and never testing it. After an ~hour of debugging it worked! I also made some progress on the bin -> onboard jam and started looking into the vast world of absolute encoders for my robotics team.

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Thu, May 30

Day 105 Today I we pretty busy with my robotics team's awards night (where I got to take an old CIM motor home) and did not make much progress on the jam. In the free time I had, I was able to start on a schematic in easy EDA. Following @karmanyaahm's advice I screen recorded so I can go back and get screenshots for the jam once I am done.

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Wed, May 29

Day 104 Today I finished some "Hello world" code for the components I am going to use in my magic 8 ball for the Bin -> Onboard jam. Now I can detect acceleration/rotation, print to an OLED screen, and make a buzzer play tones! When I was doing it, I was getting odd logs which look like gibberish to me. I also submitted my Boreal express interest form. Here is the project page for anyone interested: wokwi.com/projects/399063951719941121

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Mon, May 27

Day 103 Started working on a Bin to Onboard jam! I am planning on making a magic 8 ball with a OLED screen, accelerometer, and a piezo buzzer. Today I wired up the OLED screen and buzzer in wokwi, and got hello world code working for the display. I need to do a bit of research for the accelerometer before I implement it. I also went on a hike & finished up a CS project for school.

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Sun, May 26

Day 102 Today I commented up my website & submitted it for boba! You can find it at: evan-gan.github.io!

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Sun, May 26

Day 101 of <no goal found> Today I worked on my website & walked a trail! Currently my website has an about me section that bounces around the page with an image that gets randomly selected from the dino github and swaps with every bounce. Not sure what to add next, any suggestions?

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Sat, May 25

Day 100 of #100-days-in-public! WOW. 100 days, 100 posts. This has been quite the interesting journey, which forced me to make progress on my projects & make some cool stuff! Today I worked on my website for boba & wrote some code to make a div container bounce around the screen. Not sure what to add next, any suggestions?

Fri, May 24

Day 99 of #100-days-in-public. Today I troubleshooted my 3D printer and managed to resume a failed print after manually editing the g-code. I made a little tutorial for some reason based on the one I watched from CNC kitchen. I also started working on a website for boba, where I experimented getting div's to float around the page. Still a work in progress!

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Wed, May 22

Day 98 of #100-days-in-public. Wow. 2 more days... Not sure if I will continue 100 days or not. Today I finished packing up my blot pathing optimizer with my maze generator for blot that I worked on for some of the 100 days, but never got around to shipping. Well that ends now, it's shipped!

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Wed, May 22

Day 97 of #100-days-in-public. Today I started packaging to ship my new blot maze generator with pathing optimization I worked on a week or so ago. In my new version is a much better thumbnail in as well! One of my trail group members also submitted an onboard PR for our board prototype!

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Mon, May 20

Day 96 of #100-days-in-public. Finished the PCB design for the trail! There were some last minute changes such as swapping our our screen for a smaller OLED one like the one my group used for Apocalypse, but other than that it's done! One of our group members should be sending it out to JLCPCB today.

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Mon, May 20

Day 95 of #100-days-in-public. 5 more days to go... WOW, what a wild ride the past 2 days have been. Apocalypse was absolutely incredible! During the event the group I was in made & #shiped communication devices using ESP32's wifi network creating capabilities to have multiple talk to each other and send messages. Currently taking some inspiration from it as I finalize my groups trail project.

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Sun, May 19

Day 94 of #100-days-in-public. Lots of fun & side projects today. I went to a workshop where we took apart an off brand roomba, and another where we made an angry rug merchant. Also got to explore Toronto city, & finished up some trail stuff for PCB design!

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Sat, May 18

Day 93 of #100-days-in-public. At apocalypse today, got to ride on a turbo prop airplane for the first time. Also had a really fun time at a brain fuck workshop, and am currently in an onboard workshop!

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Fri, May 17

Day 92 of #100-days-in-public. More trail PCB stuff! My team had to switch our display because we picked one that cannot be soldered without damaging it. Currently packing for apocalypse hackathon tomorrow!

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Thu, May 16

Day 91 of #100-days-in-public. Got my blot to make weird tones without the motors moving. It changed a bit as it tried to do my drawing, so that leads me to believe you could change the tones somehow

Wed, May 15

Day 90 of #100-days-in-public. Today I laid out how I will control my 3D crane with a 2D example.

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Tue, May 14

Day 89 of #100-days-in-public. Today I started a Bin project! I am currently thinking of making a life size claw machine that can be setup for any size room.

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Mon, May 13

Day 88 of #100-days-in-public. We finished our trail PCB! Took a few hours, but it is now done. Some group members have started on the software part of the project and I plan on starting to design a case soon!

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Sun, May 12

Day 87 of #100-days-in-public. Today I caught up on some schoolwork. I also found out about slacks stats pages and found it quite interesting,

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Sat, May 11

Day 86 of #100-days-in-public. Today I worked routing the communication board with @iUnstable0 for our group's trail project. Lots of ratlines, but we are slowly making progress.

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Fri, May 10

Day 85 of #100-days-in-public. Today I did some programing for robotics, and scouted out my route from the airport to the apocalypse venue. While I was exploring in street view, I found a view from when their building was under construction.

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Thu, May 9

Day 84 of #100-days-in-public. Almost forgot to post! Today I joined the trail weekly sync call, asked lots of questions, & chatted with folks! In terms of PCB stuff, me and group members hopped on a call & made some last minute changes, such as adding a transistor to cut the power on our LCD display when not in use, as well as swapping some parts for cheaper versions. I also went through and updated the price spreadsheet & sorted everything by cost.

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Wed, May 8

Day 83 of #100-days-in-public. 3 hours and 45 minutes is the amount of time I spent with group members finishing our PCB schematic. We are pretty much done now! All that is left to do in terms of the PCB is design the layout & press order! Our board consists of a LoRa module with an antenna mount, a LCD display, a Raspbery PI pico, 56 buttons to form an entire keyboard, and a shift key! We are sitting pretty close to our budget limits but things seem to be working out so far...

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Tue, May 7

Day 82 of #100-days-in-public. Worked on a project for the trail with my group-mates! Got a good chunk done!

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Sun, May 5

Day 81 of #100-days-in-public. Today I found figured out what was messing up my code. It turned out to be me referencing the wrong array on one line. After I fixed it, I did some testing! My conclusion was that there was no major benefit with my depth first search themed algorithm, as it took about a minute to run to gain a 5 second time gain on the drawing. I have a few ideas on how to make the algorithm run faster that I may try, but for now I think I am going to press pause on this project for a few days. Testing data:

New version: 4:45 - Depth 15 in trees
New version: 4:50 - Depth of 5 in trees
Old version: 4:50 - Lines split & path somewhat optimized
Oldest version: 4:50 - Path somewhat optimized

Sun, May 5

Day 80 of #100-days-in-public. 20 more days... Today I tried to implement the new optimization I have been working on over the past week, but ran into some errors of one line being drawn twice & others not being drawn. I have a few ideas on what my have caused it, but have decided to take a break for today after working on it non-stop for 2 hours. (the red line in the image is not getting drawn)

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Sat, May 4

Day 79 of #100-days-in-public. Another day without my voice... I really wanted to make a progress update video & do a demo, but want to wait until I can talk again. In other news, I packaged up my work from yesterday into one function so it can be more easily used(see function I worked on today's declaration highlighted) & did some use case testing passing in a few possible cases I thought may break it, but nothing broke! Tomorrow I am going to incorporate it & test with time trials!

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Fri, May 3

Day 78 of #100-days-in-public. Welp, I was planning on posting a video update but I lost my voice at robotics tonight. Anyways, I got my tree stuff working! I attached a little test piece I made to see if it would find the longest line & it was successful in highlighting it in green. There are a few little things I need to do before I implement it into my main optimizer but once I am done I plan on shipping it!

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Thu, May 2

Day 77 of #100-days-in-public. Hopped on the trail kickoff call & played some organ trail with a group!

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Wed, May 1

Day 76 of #100-days-in-public. Today I was home sick, but while I was feeling better I got some progress on my project done. Basically, I am trying to make a tree structure for lines that connect like the image attached to this message. In the image you can see the tree, but notice that the data structure has no children added which leads me to believe my create tree function is broken.

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Tue, Apr 30

Day 75 of #100-days-in-public. Was busy with robotics tonight, but managed to get my hack hour in. In that time I learned about graphs in the realm of CS & implemented my own version using lessons I learned.

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Mon, Apr 29

Day 74 of #100-days-in-public. More and more code! Been doing quite a lot of code around recursion to populate a tree data structure today which makes my brain hurt.

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Sun, Apr 28

Day 73 of #100-days-in-public. Quick video today! Forgot to mention in the video, but I migrated my project from javascript to typescript.

Sat, Apr 27

Day 72 of #100-days-in-public. Every hour more power! Back in video format today!

Fri, Apr 26

Day 71 of #100-days-in-public. Didn't have enough time to record a video update today, but I'm working on getting some code working for finding the intersection point of lines. Also, I just got my pins from first robotics worlds that one of my coaches drove back with the robot.

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Thu, Apr 25

Day 70 of #100-days-in-public. New day, new video!

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Wed, Apr 24

Day 69 of #100-days-in-public. Still in video!

Tue, Apr 23

Day 68 of #100-days-in-public. Now (back) in video!

Mon, Apr 22

Day 67 of #100-days-in-public. Today is my last day in Houston. Today my robotics team (and many others) visited the Johnson space center. We got to see a space shuttle mock up and also the old mission control center which is over the new one. Overall, I had quite the time in Houston and look forwards to returning some day for robotics or rockets. Tomorrow should be back to normal updates, where I hope to improve my blot pathing planner.

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Sun, Apr 21

Day 66 of #100-days-in-public. Today was EPIC. My FRC team placed 6th in ranking and got to be the 5th alliance captain. We won our first match, but then lost our second and third. We had a really fun time though, and started rooting for a with one of our friends on it. During breaks between matches on the world stage, there were some fun half time like shows, one of my favorites being a game of Simon says, which some of my team members were in. If you are around Huston next year around First worlds I would 1000% recommend visiting Thursday or Friday and all of Saturday. The event is amazing and has amazing production quality.

Sat, Apr 20

Day 65 of #100-days-in-public. Today apparently Mark Rober was at the competition, some of my fellow team mates saw him. I played a game for a free box of their new line of build boxes & won one for free. As I was walking around the venue got to see their life size version. I found this one a bit odd, but the CIA was there recruiting. Also, I got loads of ribbons for my name tag, unfortunately I only started today and if I had started yesterday I probably would have gotten a lot more.

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Fri, Apr 19

Day 64 of #100-days-in-public. Today at FRC worlds I stopped by the hack club table, where I setup the demo blot and then ran off to scout matches for my team. I also saw a small HAAS 3 axis CNC, and some Disney imagineering stuff.

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Thu, Apr 18

Day 63 of #100-days-in-public. Got up super early to fly to Houston for the first robotics world championship. Really incredible event, the venue is gigantic & there is also a First lego league and first tech challenge event going on there. Got to see some cool stuff, like a Haas F1 car among other things.

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Wed, Apr 17

Day 62 of #100-days-in-public. Video update! Please let me know if there are any drawings I should test my optimizer on!

Mon, Apr 15

Day 61 of #100-days-in-public. Today I am continuing to take a bit of a different approach to scrapbooking, by doing video updates. I recommend watching the shorter video for context before you watch the longer video.

Sun, Apr 14

Day 60 of #100-days-in-public. Today I am taking a bit of a different approach to scrapbooking. I recorded a quick video project update. Hope you enjoy!

Sun, Apr 14

Day 59 of #100-days-in-public. Today I learned that it is possible to have a RP2040 chip run HDMI in this video. I also rearranged my board in hopes of having space to have a micro SD card slot, but found that compared to my board, SD cards are really large! While I was rearranging my board I switched over to female pins for the board's IO pins.

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Sat, Apr 13

Day 58 of #100-days-in-public. Well, I intended to look into creating a second board to go on top of this one that will include a communication chip and HDMI port, but my robotics team found out we qualified for worlds today! As soon as we heard the news we rushed to our school where we store our robot and tools to pack before school closed for the weekend. Due to the short notice we were not able to make the New England truck, so we ended up packing everything in one minivan, which is going to be driven to the competition. After we packed I joined some fellow team members in a button making party! We have loads of buttons to go but are having fun.

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Fri, Apr 12

Day 57 of #100-days-in-public. Today I labeled connections to make the circuit diagram legible and show the proper names in the board layout. Tomorrow I plan on looking into creating a second board to go on top of this one that will include a communication chip and HDMI port.

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Thu, Apr 11

Day 56 of #100-days-in-public. Today I cleaned up my PCB layout, resolved a load of design errors, and added some missing components (thanks for pointing them out @MasonMeirs-U03V4686P9N!). I am thinking of revising my circuit diagram to make it more readable/easy to route.

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Wed, Apr 10

Day 55 of #100-days-in-public. Today I had some free time and was able to get the video I took yesterday of the eclipse on a drone to slack. A bit of context if you watch the video, I was in a parking lot of sorts with lots of people around. There are some nice folk next to us with little kids which you may hear in the background. All the audio is coming from where the controller is and the camera was ~300 feet above it up in the air. (see thread for video, as scrappy does not like how large it is) I also worked on cleaning up my PCB design with some helpful observations from @AtanasAtanasov. As I went to export the design to try to get a price estimation I found lots of design rule violations that I made. Tomorrow I am going to take a closer look to see what I need to resolve.

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Tue, Apr 9

Day 54 of #100-days-in-public. Today I ventured to Northumberland to view the solar eclipse. It was truly spectacular and interesting to see some of the odd lighting effects right before and after totality. I never expected this, as all the images I have seen do not convey it, but during totality the sunlight around the moon was silver. I am currently heading back home, but delays are causing the ride to take about 6 times what it normally should.

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Mon, Apr 8

Day 53 of #100-days-in-public. I finally finished my board! Theoretically I could submit for onboard grant now, but I think I am going to take a few days to see if I can make the board smaller/neater.

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Sun, Apr 7

Day 52 of #100-days-in-public. Today my team played in the playoffs of the New England district championships(first robotics). We had quite a few interesting matches and ended up making it to the semifinals of our division. I visited the Hack Club table again and had an interesting conversation about onboard and got to take a close up look at some of the boards made for onboard. I was quite surprised at how small the via's were in real life. Also during the time between matches I walked over to the Starwars droid makers area and got to learn how they make their droids! Basically they use off the shelf components for the electronics, like scooter motors to drive, Arduino's to control some subsystems, a slip ring that connects to the dome(for continuous rotation), and LED's for all the lights. For the body of the droid some 3D print it in the winter and sand/paint it in the summer to get a clean finish.

Sat, Apr 6

Day 51 of #100-days-in-public. Today was quite exciting. I said hi to the folks staffing the hack club table, got to see a s'more making machine made by a fellow FRC team, and saw a helicopter with a chainsaw cutting trees very close to power lines. Our robot also broke in a pretty interesting way, when we tried to climb with only one of the two hooks, the rope pulling the hooks managed to bend one of the eye bolts that was routed through into kind of a curly brace.

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Fri, Apr 5

Day 50 of #100-days-in-public. No project progress today, wasn't able to get any internet. I did however go to the New England first championship with my team. I was on pit crew for a while and helped prep the robot for matches. While I was on pit crew, I got a photo of our polycarbonate climber arms that I worked on and the stress fractures that formed within them.

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Thu, Apr 4

Day 49 of #100-days-in-public. Getting pretty cramped in my PCB design. Going to be at the New England district championship for first robotics tomorrow-Saturday, and am going to try to post some robotics related scrapbooks!

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Wed, Apr 3

Day 48 of #100-days-in-public. Today I signed up for #apocalypse and continued to route my PCB. I think I may be able to finish it within the week...

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Tue, Apr 2

Day 47 of #100-days-in-public. It is very hard to start my scrapbooks with out "today I ..." but I have accomplished it with this post! Other than that, I made my board smaller, wired up more connections, and made more layout plans. In robotics, I got my team to test shooting into the trap and we were successful on our mock up. I am unsure if it will work on the real field because it is made of different materials.

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Mon, Apr 1

Day 46 of #100-days-in-public. Today I got back on track and continued to route my PCB! I made a LOT of progress. After manual routing for quite a few hours I am beginning to understand what @karmanyaahm meant when they said "routing is art." The board currently sits at 26 x 45 millimeters but I have a few ideas on how to make it smaller...

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Sun, Mar 31

Day 45 of #100-days-in-public. Today I continued worked on a blower for robotics to blow open the trap(weighted flap). We did more testing with some success but deemed the blower not powerful enough. Instead we tried just shooting into it and had lots of replaceable success where we shot the note(12" foam ring) into the trap. We also ended up rebuilding the leaf blower we used for the blower and it miraculously still works good as new! When I got home I played around with it a bit and levitated basketball 3 feet away from the nozzle of the blower. Unfortunately I did not get a video, but perhaps I will take a video tomorrow and post it.

Sat, Mar 30

Day 44 of #100-days-in-public. Today I thought I would have time to continue work on my board, but got sidetracked and ended up CAD'ing a housing for the trap blower (see my post from yesterday for context). I managed CAD the original housing but did not have enough time to finish it up with a motor mount like in our prototype. For our prototype we swapped out our NEO 550 for a 775 and found a significant increase in power of the blower. For anyone curious here is the CAD I made today and am still working on: CAD Also, I attached a video of us testing. As you can see in the video we were pretty nervous with the close tolerance of the blade to the housing.

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Fri, Mar 29

Day 43 of #100-days-in-public. Today I worked on routing my board. Per @karmanyaahm's suggestion I decided to route by hand. While I was doing that I reduced my trace width by .054 millimeters to .2 millimeters. This enabled my board to actually be routable. I also talked with @Micha and they suggested a few changes such as putting my capacitors closer to the chip, which I am going to do now. In robotics tonight I helped assemble the parts from a leaf blower we took apart the other night into a FRC legal blower. The goal of the blower it to blow open the trap(Polycarbonate flap on the hinge) so that we can shoot a note(12" foam ring) into it from the ground. It worked pretty well with a NEO 550. Tomorrow I am going to CAD a 3D printable version of the duct and mount to save weight, as well as switch to a 775 for a 11000 rpm -> 18000 rpm increase.

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Thu, Mar 28

Day 42 of #100-days-in-public. Today I continued to hack away at PCB routing. I had to redo lots of connections to make it possible to route, but I am going there. I'm currently really confused how to get the ground plane working so that things that I routed to ground in the circuit diagram connect to it. I am contemplating if I should full on try to revise the circuit diagram to make it easier to route. I'm making progress, very slowly but steady!

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Wed, Mar 27

Day 41 of #100-days-in-public. Today I played around with routing on my PCB a bit more in the free time I had. At robotics today I took apart a leaf blower to salvage the blade to use for our robot to open a flap in the game field. I was quite surprised how small the blade was for how strong the blower is.

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Tue, Mar 26

Day 40 of #100-days-in-public. Today I got back to my PCB! I started trying to layout the actual board but remembered I never learned how to use that part of Easy EDA. Instead I used the auto router with some success. My goal for the coming days is to figure out how to setup the auto router with nets connecting to their respective planes, put some components on the bottom of the board, and make it smaller.

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Mon, Mar 25

Day 39 of #100-days-in-public. Today was day 2 of the FRC event I was at. My team ended up losing, but we won the impact award so we are headed to district championships. I did not have a lot of free time today, but in my free time I made a spreadsheet to try to get an idea of how much it would cost to run a 70 person 48 hour hackathon idea I am considering pursuing. The answer I came to is that it would cost around $7,485 to run if the venue is free. The idea as you might gather from the cost's spreadsheet is to run a hackathon on an island in the Boston harbor.

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Sun, Mar 24

Day 38 of #100-days-in-public. Today I began to start brainstorm a fun hackathon idea, and I plan to start writing an outline for it in the coming days to see how much it would theoretically cost to run. On another note, I was at the Revere FRC event today and did not time to work on my RP2040 project. The image attached is a photo of the innards of our robot typically covered up by our sponsor panel.

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Sat, Mar 23

Day 37 of #100-days-in-public. Today I continued to work on my board and hooked up all 30 GPIO(General purpose in out) pins to two 1x15 straight square pin arrays. This will enable me to be able to easily attach things to it. However, as I continued reading the hardware design guide I realized that the people who wrote the guide used a ~15x2 so that one row of pins could be used as ground for each IO pin. After I did that, I continued reading through the RP2040 hardware guide and found they made an example board for VGA and audio. Tomorrow I plan to read through it to see how they approached it and did it to apply it to my HDMI-RP2040 board.

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Fri, Mar 22

Day 36 of #100-days-in-public. Today I continued my RP2040 implementation. I finished up everything I could find in the hardware guide from Raspberry Pi and swapped out most of my components for cheaper and smaller versions. I managed to get the cost down to ~$3 for just the components! I also decided to go with a 6 layer board because originally I wanted a 5 layer board (one ground plane, one 1.1v, one 3.3v, and two trace planes) but the closest JLPCB offered was 6.

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Thu, Mar 21

Day 35 of #100-days-in-public. Today I added flash memory to my RP2040 implementation. It still needs a bit of work, and I have some questions I need to ask to the folk of #onboard.

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Wed, Mar 20

Day 34 of #100-days-in-public Over 1/3 of the way to 100 days! Today I was able to find better surface mount resistors(with help from the folks over at #onboard) for my board and added the to the board. In CS class today I learned about sorting algorithms and came up with one (that the teacher later told me was called bubble sort) Also, in robotics I revised a hook I designed for climbing that my team members say look like a duck.

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Tue, Mar 19

Day 33 of #100-days-in-public. Today I started back up on my PCB design in Easy EDA. I spent a few hours trying to find the correct parts based on the RP2040 hardware guide. I had some success but realized a good chunk of my parts are not surface mount so I am going to look for replacements before I get the board manufactured. I also learned today how to calculate combined series and parallel capacitance for capacitors.

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Sun, Mar 17

Day 32 of #100-days-in-public. Today, I dusted off and took a look at my project ideas doc and found one I am considering doing. Just a quick note: I like to write my projects as if I am making a product, so I use "the user" a lot. The idea is for my onboard grant to create a HDMI board that connects to a TV/display, allowing you to program it to display anything you would like and play any music you choose. Accompanying it, I will make (or at least attempt to) a website that users can use to program the display by setting pixels, playing sound, and seeing a preview (like Blot and Sprig). The editor will have a second section for libraries that are user-created. By default, users will be able to retrieve the screen's width and height. The website will be entirely client-side, so the user does not need a network for it. A future addition would be some sort of controller that accompanies it with an open communication protocol that the user has to implement or use a library some other user makes.

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Sun, Mar 17

Day 31 of #100-days-in-public. Today, for the second day in a row I #shiped a project! Last summer some friends and I made a fun version of minesweeper in about the amount of time a hackathon would have. We were all new to JS and we were shown P5 and decided to make minesweeper. I never got around to cleaning it up and publishing it until now. At the time I did not understand github so we all coded in the same document with VS code's liveshare. On a completely unrelated note I spent most of my day at robotics today where we visited wpi's practice field.

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Sat, Mar 16

Day 30 of #100-days-in-public. I #shiped the game! Have fun playing it! See if you can try to get the merchant to give you money to take the rug. My friend and I managed to get the merchant to give us $7500. Up next I want to work out the error pages for my site.

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Fri, Mar 15

Day 29 of #100-days-in-public. Happy PI day! Today I worked on my site more for two and a half hours to get live responses(seeing responses as the AI writes) working, only to later in the day get paywalled by google. I am hoping it is just their changing capacity because it stops pay-walling me randomly. In other news I checked my website this morning to find one of the changes I made yesterday finally updated, so I can now post to my website! I expect to ship a version tomorrow.

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Thu, Mar 14

Day 28 of #100-days-in-public. Today I spent a few hours trying to get my website working. Previously I set it up to redirect to another site I have that has a 6 letter domain. After looking more at bluehost I could not figure out how do make it a site of its own. I think the I may have to look into godaddy and figure out if that is where it is redirecting. During robotics I designed a new climber hook, after getting feedback from driveteam. I went through about 3 revisions before getting one we were satisfied with enough to cut. The left hook is the old one that we brought to BSU and the right one is the one we are cutting tomorrow

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Wed, Mar 13

Day 27 of #100-days-in-public. Today I spent time getting my react site to compile. Originally it was set so that you have to specify a directory it is going to run in but I managed to change that to the ./ directory so it can run in any direction. I also added some instructions for the user. Tomorrow I am going to work on getting it up on my website and shipping it. After I ship it I think I may try to incorporate an interaction library like MUI or EUI now that I am more familiar with react. On another note, I got my fudge from #10-days-in-public!

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Tue, Mar 12

Day 26 of #100-days-in-public. I want to take a bit of a different approach on my #scrapbook today. Currently my Gemini based rug game is in a state where I am considering #shiping it but have an idea of one last feature that will require me to modify some of my code to create, and make it much more original. I think I may ship the current version tomorrow and then continue working on the last feature. Today I had a bit of a realization why react is such a good framework. Basically, my goal is to have a text box pop up when the user needs to enter their api key and not show up if it is already in the URL(see yesterdays video). The beauty of react is that I can do this very simply in one element by simply detecting if they need to enter a key, and if so returning a different piece of HTML. If they already have a key then I can simply return nothing and nothing pops up. With React I can just throw this element in anywhere and it just pops up when it needs to and disappears when it is not needed. Also, React allows me to easily modify page layout, say for example if I wanted my chat box to be below the input I can do that with swapping one line of code.

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Mon, Mar 11

Day 25 of #100-days-in-public. 1/4 of the way to 100 days! Today I spent most of my day at the BSU FRC competition. My team ended up making it to the finals and losing. For us the competition was a huge win because even though we were having some issues through out the day, bringing our ranking down (mostly electrical blowing fuses), we ended up having no issues that effected playoffs. When I was going to the competition I last minute used my blot to make a if lost label for my water bottle. I was going to do it on blue tape, but I forgot to get a sharpie and was in a rush (pen did not work on tape). I was able to make progress on my Rug game and now can store the users API key in the browser's URL (see video attached). I am getting close to finishing this project, and have one or two more lined up. Next up on this project is reference types in JS. This will enable me to make one AI be the rug buyer and the other the seller.

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Sun, Mar 10

Day 24 of #100-days-in-public. As I predicted yesterday I had no time to work on my project today, as I was at the BSU FRC competition. Our robot worked pretty well and we only broke a little bit.

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Sat, Mar 9

Day 23 of #100-days-in-public. Today I implemented the AI! Now I am back to the point I reached with the pure html/css/js. Over the next two days I am going to be at a FRC competition, so I am going to have less time. If I do have time, I am going to try to make the api key stored in the browser URL. In my short testing for this post the AI just solved the problem for me and said it would sell it to me for the goal ($100). My prompts are sometimes blocked for "Safety" even when they say "Hi there!" so I may also look into that.

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Thu, Mar 7

Day 22 of #100-days-in-public. Today I continued on my react journey. It's blue! I started adding(basic) CSS to my page. My page now also takes in the input from the input box when the user presses enter or send. If they hold shift and press enter they can make a newline. I still have yet to figure out how to apply Wack Club Sans to the prompt box, but have been able to apply it everything else. Overall I made lots of progress today. Now I have the framework, all I have to do is add the AI!

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Thu, Mar 7

Day 21 of #100-days-in-public. Still with it, one day at a time. Today, like yesterday I was swamped with school, robotics, and another program I do and had very little time to work on the project. However, I did manage to get a text box up and have thought out an architecture/outline on how I can write the code well. Next up state variables!

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Wed, Mar 6

Day 20 of #100-days-in-public. 1/5 of the way there! Today I had effectively no time to work on my project. I have lots of schoolwork and my FRC team has our first competition this weekend at BSU. We are pretty prepared but have lots of tuning to do for our code (see robot shooting photo attached). I did get an Onboard poster that I plan to hang up in my school when I have time Thursday.

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Tue, Mar 5

Day 19 of #100-days-in-public. Today I started looking at two different libraries for user interactions, MUI and EUI. I am still in the process of comparing both, mostly to find which is simpler/more flexible. On another note, after watching my blot draw for ~1 hour, I started looking into the low level blot drawing code to find where I can make a few changes to it. But, in the end I realized I was looking in the wrong place. I may look more into it tomorrow.

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Mon, Mar 4

Day 18 of #100-days-in-public. Today I started to learn react and got a development environment setup(see images below). As of now my react site is very basic but I intend to learn more about react to fully utilize it in the coming days. I did find an old TV as well today and am considering (at a later date) trying to take it apart to extract its fresnel lens if it has one to play around with it.

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Sun, Mar 3

Day 17 of #100-days-in-public. Today I programed for my robotics team and visited WPI's practice field with my team to test. I saw HCB on the sponsor slide on a comp Livestream they were playing. For my website project, I did not accomplish much other than learning some more benefits of react that may outweigh the cons. The benefits I found are it is very modular and you can also have components react to variable changes and change their display states. More simply put, you can use react to display a model rather than changing the model around the display(ex. event listeners).

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Fri, Mar 1

Day 16 of #100-days-in-public. Today I put up some Hack Club posters in my school. I also wrote some code for my robotics team for our shooter. As I was looking into react I am questioning if it would be helpful for my rug game rendition. From what I found online so far it seems it has a nicer syntax and ease of swapping stuff around, but is more resource intensive/less efficient than the default html. I am going to continue to look into it to figure out if it is worth using it.

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Fri, Mar 1

Day 15 of #100-days-in-public. Today I added a bit of CSS styling to my game. My original goal was to get two AI's talking together but was limited because of some odd safety features in chrome that prevent JS files from using importmap'ed library's. Tomorrow I plan on trying to switch over to react to a) learn more about it and b) avoid some of the issues I ran into today.

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Wed, Feb 28

Day 14 of #100-days-in-public. Today I worked more on my rug merchant recreation with Googles' AI. I got it working! Now I can play the rug game for free. The only caveat is I do tend to trigger google's very sensitive safety detector when I try to convince the seller to give it to me when I will preform some action in exchange(ex. film a commercial for the rugs). Now that I have a basic version, I am going to try to make two AI merchants haggle with each other. I am also going to make the page look nicer because right now it is very plain. I attached the current version of it to this post for anyone who wants to play around with it. All you have to do is unzip it, open the html page in a browser like chrome, and put your api key(how to get a key) in the url (ex. /index.html?key=<YOUR KEY HERE>)

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Wed, Feb 28

Day 13 of #100-days-in-public. Today I tried to implement Google's AI into my webpage with some success. After I had a successful attempt I tried to make the code better but ended up just breaking it for the time being. In the background I have been playing around with my blot and having fun with it. I have a few ideas on how to optimize the drawing speed which I will try to implement at a later date.

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Tue, Feb 27

Day 12 of #100-days-in-public. Today I was busy with robotics, but I started to try to recreate the rug game with gemini ai because it has a free api. I am trying to make the whole thing client side so I do not have to setup a server to handle user api keys.

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Mon, Feb 26

Day 11 of #100-days-in-public. I suppose we will now see how far I can go with the days in public. Today was the last day of #wonderland where we had a science fair for all the group's projects. The group I was in finished up our game and decorated the fan we took apart and had it turn on and off randomly(we did not have enough time to figure out how to make it play music). On another note, I got my blot today! I sat down for about 4 hours and assembled it and finally got it working. I got it to draw my submission(see video attached).

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Sun, Feb 25

Day 10 of #10-days-in-public! Today I was at #wonderland! The group I am in is making a cooking themed game and also took apart a box fan for the motor because we thought it would be useful(in the beginning). We managed to hook the motor up to a relay and then to an Arduino micro. I tried to make the motor play music by altering the frequencies where it receives power. As I was trying a version of my code I managed to electrocute myself for the first time! After that we heavily taped over the exposed high voltage pins. Then using code group members wrote to try to control the oscillation speed, we ended up using Arduino's default tone library with the motor with some success. We the end result was just varying the speed the motor rotated at. In our playing around with the motor we found it got pretty hot. I plan to continue my PCB project (after wonderland) may attempt #100-days-in-public

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Sat, Feb 24

Day 9 of #10-days-in-public. Today I got a working layout for my button grid in Easy EDA. Each side of each grid feeds into a 8-3 binary encoder. This post is a bit rushed because I am currently at #wonderland and forgot to post.

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Fri, Feb 23

Day 8 of #10-days-in-public. Today I worked on a side project, but did pick out a button for my PCB after learning about different types of buttons. The side project I worked on is a program to get all the match data in FRC history from The Blue Alliance. With that program I wrote I found that the red alliance has 98404 win's and the blue alliance has 86987 win's as of me last running it in 2023. Once this robotics season is over I want to use it to find some statistics and try to predict scores for future games. I have attached I attached the output(named "nodeTestOutput") from when I ran it in post 2023 season and the program that I wrote to create the data dump.

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Thu, Feb 22

Day 7 of #10-days-in-public. Did not have a lot of time to spend on the project today, but I did some more brainstorming for the button layout. My goal with the button layout is to have a simple layout with the fewest amount of inputs to the host board(imagine my button array is a board shield of sorts). Short recap: Originally I was planning on plugging all the buttons I would use into a binary encoder so I could detect which button is pressed (assuming one button is pressed at a time). That should have a # of output pins of log2(n) n being the number of buttons. I had another approach to use a grid of buttons where pressing a button lets power flow through its row and column so you can get an X,Y position(see drawing from second post). That method would have the # of output pins of sqrt(n)*2. When I graphed the first two strategies the binary encoder one came out to have less output pins. Today's stuff: As I went to start designing the part today I learned there are no 40 input binary encoders, so that got me thinking of alternatives. After thinking for a while I thought, "What if you put binary encoders on the end of the grid method, that should have a # of output pins of log2(sqrt(n)*2), surely that should result in fewer output pins, right?" Well I graphed it and it actually resulted in less output pins(see image below). Tomorrow I plan on creating a schematic for the button pad with real parts. Here is the graph where I graphed the different methods.

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Wed, Feb 21

Day 6 of #10-days-in-public. Today I found a really nice schematic guide to help me understand some electrical schematics much better. In addition I continued to make progress on my PCB circuit design(see screenshot below). As I have been looking back on the start of this project I have realized that I started trying to design a complex PCB with out learning the basics. After that realization I started taking the project slower and spending more time learning before I design.

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Tue, Feb 20

Day 5 of #10-days-in-public! Today, after being very confused with some circuit diagrams yesterday, I learned a lot about PCB design for my project (so I can design a better PCB). Bulleted below are the main things I learned; • Electrical planes - Layers in the PCB (typically made up of some of the planes described below) ◦ Ground plane - Good for shielding board's more sensitive electronics ◦ Power plane - Good for distributing power, but also help shield signals from one plane to another ◦ Trace plane(I am sure this is the wrong name) - Plane with actual circuits with the traces you make • Vias - Holes used to connect one plane to another (typically a trace to another plane) • In line resistors - Reduces compassionate in outgoing signal lines so there is less noise • Zero ohm resistors - Often used to connect two surface mount pads for parts of the PCB that does not need to be connected but can be later On a separate note, during my procrastination, I started experimenting with shading in custom polygons in Blot. Right now it does not look the best but I hope to improve it!

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Mon, Feb 19

Day 4 of #10-days-in-public. Today I started designing the basic circuit layout using the RP2040 docs. Other than that I made no major progress. Figuring out what the minimum design is has been quite the challenge, that I have not fully succeeded at. I am still currently looking at how I can learn about the chip in a more effective way.

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Sun, Feb 18

Day 3 of #10-days-in-public. Today I was going to try to make a minimum viable board using the RP2040 but realized there is a large learning curve I need to overcome before I am ready to design. Due to that I spent most of my time on the project today reading the technical docs trying to gain a better understanding of the chip. I did however, refamiliarise myself with Easy EDA and created a starting document with one RP2040 chip in it.

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Sat, Feb 17

Day 2 of #10-days-in-public. Today I brainstormed how to get an output from ~40 buttons for my calculator keys. The chip I want to use (RP2040) has 30 general-purpose IO ports, so it does not have enough to detect all the buttons; however, only one button will be pressed at a time. At first, I was thinking of doing a grid with buttons (see drawing) for the electrical connections so I would have the square root of 40 outputs times two (in this case, about 13) outputs instead of 40. Then, after thinking a bit more, I realized that I could also have a button represent a number (ex., button 1, button 2, etc.) and convert it to binary with a simple circuit or chip. This would have log base two of 40 outputs needed, which would be about 6 in this case. I was curious if the binary approach would still be better as the number of connections went on, so I graphed the relationship and found that the binary approach was much better. For example, if we had 13 outputs like I calculated above for the grid approach, with the binary approach for 13 outputs, we could have about 8192 input values! That's a lot of values! Tomorrow I plan on making a basic example board using the RP2040, so I have some foundation to work off of.

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Fri, Feb 16

Day 1 of #10-days-in-public! Today I started researching a driver chip for my calculator themed development board. After asking the folks of #onboard what chips they used in their projects I ended up deciding(for now) to use the RP2040. The pro's for this chip is that it is made by a credible company(raspberry pi), it has 30 general purpose IO pins, 4 of which can be used as analogue inputs, it's low cost($1), and it has loads of documentation. The con's(I have found so far) are the 3.3V logic level and lack of built-in wireless connectivity. I am currently thinking of possibly adding on another chip to use with it. I also started taking apart my calculator to figure out how it work, may keep digging into it tomorrow.

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