Random blog posts from Martijn Braam
I started my day checking the headlines on news sites and saw an interesting title that caught my eye because it's about CSS. These posts are generally interesting because it'll mean I learn some new CSS tricks. The posts I've read are https://dbushell.com/2026/07/03/fixing-full-bleed-css/ and since this refers to https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/full-bleed/ I've read that too. And the only thing I…
One of the annoying things about electronics is that so many companies must make their own incompatible battery packs. For many products these are expensive but at some level still reasonable, the battery pack contains the protection circuitry and some guaranteed high quality Li-ion cells. This is not one of those devices. A significant portions of all wireless microphones by Sennheiser use the…
It's now about a month after the previous update on the camera hardware and a lot of new things have happened. The most obvious one from the picture above is that the case has been replaced by 3d printed parts. I finally got the displays I wanted to use for this camera from Waveshare, the 5" inch ones that are not native-portrait orientation. With this I can now actually run the user interface…
Once again someone is wrong on the internet, so I have to write about it... Luckily it's about being pedantic about something that nobody cares more than 10 seconds about. When I started with computers resolutions were simple, you had 640x480, 800x600 and if you had a fancy monitor: 1024x768. At some point this switched to 480p, 720p and 1080p when monitors got better and computers got used for…
I'm certainly not the first person making a camera from a Raspberry Pi. Over the years I've seen several projects coming across my feeds that make various types of camera from the Pi since the first camera module was introduced. Generally these were first simple 3d printed enclosures for the raspberry pi without any display and just the camera module in front making a very simple digital point and…
Getting KiCad working One of the things I want to get working is KiCad so I can also do the electrical design stuff also on the laptop I'm bringing to FOSDEM. It turns out this is pretty hard since I've been building BodgeOS as wayland-only distribution and it's seems that only pretty recently there has been options for running KiCad without Xorg. I've been packaging a lot of dependencies for…
I've been spending too much time trying to get Webkit built in BodgeOS so I decided I distract myself by messing with the kernel package instead. Currently BodgeOS has a single kernel package called linux-lts which is 200MB while installed. This is a kernel with relatively many kconfig options enabled. It has the normal splitting options from the abuild system that split of all the documentation…
For a few weeks now the SSD in my Thinkpad x280 I use for traveling has been slightly broken. For some moments the laptop would lock up completely for a few seconds, which I originally thought was just memory pressure because it only has 8GB of RAM. Now a week ago my new SSD arrived and I once again had to make a choice of what to install on it. Last year I just quickly threw an Ubuntu install on…
The sane solution to capturing wildlife going through your garden is to use a dedicated wildlife camera. In my experience these things are pretty much always trash. The devices I've seen are all basically cheap dash-cam boards that happen to have motion detection on it and produce the image quality of a 2001 webcam. It's also a bit wasteful to get a new device to capture video when I already have…
So what is an embedded network? I found it pretty hard to find a good name for this but I've come across them many times and created some myself. A good example here is a portable video rack. You drag a rack case around with video and network equipment and you need to connect it to the network of the venue to stream to the internet. The devices in the rack need to communicate with each other but…
I've been making boards in KiCad for a while now. I really enjoy figuring out how to route all the components in the PCB editor, especially the weird "hard" things like differential high speed signals. I'm probably not very good at it but so far the margins for the stuff I'm designing is wide enough that it works anyway. Every time I'm working on this I feel like this would make a neat puzzle…
Looking back it seems like making an alpha release of Megapixels 2.0 was a great choice. The various components that make up Megapixels have been through the packaging steps at Mobian for example which brought some light to issues that would improve the packaging. A lot more eyes have hit the code in this release than the random stuff thrown to git and I'm really happy I've received a lot of…
The FOSDEM video capture box is a custom device for doing all the in-room stuff for the live-streams of the event. It contains a Radxa x4 SBC, a digital audio mixer, an HDMI capture card, some USB chargers and a network switch. Every room that is livestreamed has two of these boxes, one in front that captures the audio and the HDMI signal for the projector. The other box is in the back of the room…
After the previous post about bringing up Sway I spend a bit of time packaging random system components you'd expect for a desktop system. Mainly building GTK so I can have some actual applications running. This is mainly pretty relaxing work. Find a component to build, figure out the dependencies, package them one by one by figuring out the required commands and making a tiny build script.…
In the previous post I figured out all the internal weirdness of Linux booting to get BodgeOS running on actual hardware. The next goal was very clear: getting to a graphical environment. At the start of this month I had the goal set to running a web browser before 2024 ends but I've now slightly adjusted my goals down to being able to type this blog post in a terminal on my new OS. So what does…