Week in Review June 20th to June 26th

Raspberry Pi Pico

I received my first Pico in the mail this week!

I might make a full blog post on the Pico at a later date but in summary I really love how beginner friendly the documentation is that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has put together.

What I've done so far is connect the Pico to this MAX485-based RS485-UART board I bought at the same time. The other end I have wired into a RS485-USB adapter connected to my PC. Using the hello_world example from the pico-examples repository I was successfully able to read the hello world! messages from the Pico on /dev/ttyUSB0 using the GNU screen utility.

The next step will be to learn how to control the direction control pins which you can see plugged into GPIO16 on the Pico. This will allow both TX (writing) and RX (receiving).

Cobalt Planning

No real coding on Cobalt this week, however I've created a bunch of Projects in Linear to break down the work necessary to have Cobalt be usable by others. The aim is to chip away at it without burning out or getting distracted by other projects so having some structure to the development process will be invaluable.

Does this look like good enough functionality for a simple self-hostable video sharing site?

New Keyboard - Keychron Q1

This is the Keychron Q1 with Gateron Pro Brown switches. Seeing as I spend so much time on my computer I decided to splurge on a high quality keyboard. I wanted something with a sturdy chassis and tactile but quieter keys than my current Razer with Cherry Blue switches. This keyboard has an aluminium body which makes it sturdy and heavy. It feels premium which to me is important if I want to take pride in what I do and enjoy sitting down to code after work.

Upgrading this blog

Added support for full bleed images / videos as well as utils for 60%/70%/80% images that escape from the width of the text column.

Credit for the implementation goes to the author Josh Comeau here.

Pretty cool hey?

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Thank you for reading,
Omniscient