Welcome to the outpouring of my tiny mind 🧠
This will hopefully be a place where I can post about projects I am working on or things that interest me. And who knows maybe someone else will find this content helpful or fun.
Music is a key component of my life, I have it on in the background when I am working, I use it as motivation at the gym and I relax to it after a busy day.
Over the years music has been a constant companion but the format or method of listening has changed.
Ever since I upgraded my gaming pc to a PCIe 5 capable video card (5080 FE) I have had infrequent but deeply annoying instability issues when booting the pc. A reboot would fix, but the problem would not go away, after months of troubleshooting I finally found a fix.
I was lucky enough to be surprised for my birthday by my wonderful wife Scarlet. She whisked me away for a few days to a holiday home in Dungeness sat directly on the beach, it was idyllic and a much needed rest. We also got to ride on a steam train! Pug included :)
Having moved my gaming pc back to Windows (yes I know…) due to a big upgrade in processor and graphics card (9800X3D and RTX 5080) I have been setting up a stats screen using AIDA64. One area that was lacking however was the ability for me to pull in MQTT data and display it on the sensor panel. Time to fire up Visual Studio.
Having just taken the rhe jump from Arch linux over to Fedora 40 (due to some recent AMD related graphics issues,) on my gaming pc Euclid, I needed to document the quirks of my system so the next time I swap around it will be less painful!
I love living by the Seaside, I have lived near it all of my life and I do not think I would ever want to leave it behind.
I have deployed websites using Wordpress for many years, I have hosted this site and draytronics.co.uk using Wordpress. But as for all the upsides of convenience and familiarity, as time has gone on I have been less and less happy with security, performance and bloat. Even the simplicity of editing has taken a backwards step over the years.
So I have taken the opportunity to reconsider and move this site over to Hugo, and run it on some low power hardware with a vintage and fun twist.
When I was idly browsing Instagram I came across an advert for (in my opinion) an incredibly expensive (€139) glass brick light. I can’t find the original advert but I believe this article shows the light from the same company.
The light used manual filters to change the colour, was not smart and I think was a lot for what is mainly one glass brick. I thought I could do better and for a lot cheaper, so I did.
This is a relatively complete guide on how to build a mechanical keyboard prototype and get it functioning with QMK. Two different microcontrollers will be demonstrated (ATMegs32A, ATMega328P) and it should provide a solid starting point for anyone wishing to build a keyboard from the ground up. This is going to the the base I build on with an aim to designing, testing and producing a selection of full keyboards.
The subject of this blog is a build log, that will cover my build of a 3D printed hand wired 40% keyboard. It will include basic details on 3D printing, hand wiring, general assembly and software programming with QMK along with references to the guides I used.