A collection of slightly mad projects, instructive/educational, and generally interesting stuff. Building projects around the Arduino and ESP32 platforms - we'll be exploring AI, Computer Vision, Audio, 3D Printing - it may get a bit eclectic...
I read a paper this week called The AI Layoff Trap . It has an interesting thesis. If you look at what is happening with automation and laying people off, and take it to the ultimate conclusion, no one will have a job. If that happens no one can afford to pay for a company’s goods or services. So, logically, it doesn’t make sense for a company to automate all the jobs and lay everyone off. If they…
Here’s a response Claude came up with recently. I was asking it to review some of the code it had been writing for my “Open Vibe Code” Elite clone - you can play it here in your browser , it’s surprisingly good. “Twenty-seven echoes; most are two halves of a seam stated from each side, which is correct. Four are true duplicates. Checking two of them:” There’s a lot of this kind of output coming…
In November 2006 I put everything I owned in my parents’ loft, had a great many injections, and flew to Guatemala. I came back thirteen months later having crossed fourteen countries between Antigua and Tierra del Fuego, and I’d written the whole thing up as it happened — 182 posts typed into internet cafés, hostel lobbies and the occasional boat. That blog is still at travellingchris.blogspot.com…
I keep needing the same thing - a really basic dev board for whatever Espressif module I’m playing with. USB-C, a 3.3V regulator, BOOT and EN buttons, three LEDs (5V present, 3.3V present, and one on a GPIO so you can run the blink sketch), and every GPIO broken out on headers. Nothing clever, just the minimum board that gets a bare module doing something. While building the ESP32 module database…
Fresh from resurrecting Tanks! Mayhem , I went digging for the other game I wrote back in the early App Store days: Invaders! , a 2009 Space Invaders homage for the iPhone. It wasn’t a straight clone - the aliens teleport in, some of them carry bubble shields, power-ups drift down on parachutes, and the score is displayed on glowing nixie tubes, because in 2009 I apparently thought everything…
Back in 2010 I wrote a tank game. It started life as a competition entry to win a laptop from HP by writing something for the Palm Pre (remember those?), got ported to the iPhone and iPad, and ended up on the App Store as Tanks! Mayhem , a Battlezone-style shooter with glowing vector graphics. It didn’t fly off the shelves; even back then competition was stiff in the app world. But it didn’t do…
Every time I put text on a TFT display with TFT_eSPI I end up staring at the same built-in fonts: chunky, jagged, and very 1980s. Which is a shame, because the library has been able to draw beautiful anti-aliased “smooth fonts” for years. The rendering was never the problem, the tooling was. The official way to make a smooth font involves installing the Processing IDE, editing a Java sketch, and…
Every time I start a new project the first question is the same: which module should I use? Picking an Espressif chip means pulling up datasheets, hunting for pinout diagrams, checking which pins are safe, and ending up with a dozen browser tabs open. So I built something to fix that. www.atomic14.com/esp32 is a free, community-maintained database of Espressif modules. Every module in one place,…
A little while back I ripped the PIR and mystery chip out of one of these cheap night lights and dropped a microwave radar module in its place . It worked beautifully: much better sensitivity, sensible timeout, the whole thing tucked back into the original case like nothing had happened. But I had a sneaking suspicion I might have improved one thing and quietly ruined another. The radar module is…
ESP-IDF v6 dropped back in March and the GitHub releases page is already showing v6.0.1 - so I figured it was time to stop hiding in the v5.x cave and actually try it out. This is a nice gentle introduction. We’ll install the IDF, wire it up to VS Code, build the classic Blink example for an ESP32-S3, then start poking at menuconfig to do the things you can’t easily do from the Arduino IDE.…