End of Summer Update

2 minute read

End of Summer Update

I’ve been working on decluttering again in preparation for a new part time job(Somerville HS Makerspace) and GG heading to daycare. All microcontrollers and “fun” accessories are being put to work or they’re out of the house. I’ve had accumualated a lot of fun devboards over the years and it’s been fun to scheme up some projects for them. I’ve also been testing out some gen AI to help me punch through roadblocks along the way. It’s been odd, slightly strange feeling, and definitely made me reflect on my education practices. If I were to be heading back into the classroom I would be dreading dealing with AI’s grip on students in the classroom, I’d probably have to rewrite most assignments I used previously.

Anyways, enough on that, here are links to what I’m working on. The following are fairly fleshed out:

  • My old gaming clan’s website redone for 2025
    • A new battlefield game is coming out that an old pal and I like thanks to the open beta, seems fitting to revive the clan.
  • PyPortal WeatherStar III
    • I’ve had an affinity for WeatherStar systems since we first had cable and the weather channel growing up. I’ve wanted to have one on display at home, sans raspi this seems to be the closest I’ll get with an ESP32 WROOM.
  • Portable Media Server with jcorp nomad
    • I’ve you’ve chatted with me in the last few years you’ll know that I’ve been heavy into homelabbing. This project seemed cool as a mobile media server based on ESP32 S3, all coded in Arduino IDE! A cool learning experience as I have ported it to a USB C variant of the devboard it was based on.
  • MBTA MatrixPortal M4
    • I had a couple of these MatrixPortals with LED Matrix to count down time until holidays in the classroom. No need for that currently (and don’t intend to bring on into new gig). This seemed fun as we take the Red Line into downtown Boston quite frequently. It’s not perfect, but a good way for me to wrap my head around upgrading a devboard, all library, dependencies, and scope out possible errors with some help from Claude.ai…

These last too projects are more ideas and works in progress, links will possibly be added another time:

  • Adafruit Funhouse Homelab Stats
    • I kinda want to display stats related to my unraid server statuses, jellyfin media weekly stats, and kavita reading stats. Total WIP as I don’t really know if I’ll use any of the inputs on the board. Which is kinda a shame. If I put it on a shelf maybe I’ll install the PIR to increase backlight brightness when you walk by it.
  • Adafruit CLUE Beacon Widget
    • Remix of their beacon example, basically I’ll pre-load it with links to my self hosted media libraries (books, audio, video, etc). It will be a tiny device that cycles through the various local services for each media, click a button and it will give you a QR to scan with your phone and also blast a bluetooth beacon with the link as well.
    • I may honestly never use this as I will probably have a dummy library with props that contain NFC tags with the same links…

Anyways, enough for now, back to tinkering. Keep on rockin’!

Updated:

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