VirtualWolf @virtualwolf@aus.social

Hi everyone! I've moved over here from mastodon.art, since my enthusiasm far outstripped any sort of actual talent I had, haha.

I live in Western Sydney with my lovely wife Kristina and our half dachshund/half Maltese dog Beanie, and am a hobbyist coder and photographer, Apple enthusiast, and general all-round geek.

#introductions

BOOM. Trigger pulled on the TD-17KV! 🥁🎉 I am EXTREMELY excited about this, I loved playing the drums in Guitar Hero World Tour but they were frustratingly poorly-made, and would frequently not register hits which would break my streaks. (And fun fact, with the right adapter these Roland drums can actually be hooked up to Guitar Hero which I am TOTALLY doing).

I spent this afternoon cleaning and tidying and rearranging the back room because I'm going to buy myself an electronic drum kit and learn to play drums! And we have absolutely nowhere else to put it, haha. I was originally looking at the Roland TD-07KV, but I'm leaning towards splurging for the TD-17KV instead...

I blagged a thing, for the first time since November last year!

"More fun with temperature sensors: ESP32 microcontrollers and MicroPython"

https://blog.virtualwolf.org/more-fun-with-temperature-sensors-esp32-microcontrollers-and-micropython/

#blogging #esp32 #python

I've got the week off work this week and we don't have our dog walker coming due to COVID, so I'm taking Beanie out for his daily walks. It's nice to see sheep still around in places, but man these unit blocks are springing up like weeds. At least they're right near the train station anyway.

Y'know what rules? Having a week off work. 😎

Also, not Raspberry Pi-related specifically, but I had great fun playing around with my ESP32s, I think I'm going to order a couple more to do... something with.

I wonder if I can get the PaPiRus e-ink display driver (https://github.com/PiSupply/PaPiRus) installed and working inside a Docker container... 🤔

Current status: hairy.

(I'm playing around in Lightroom on my iPhone. Actually quite happy with this photo, haha).

Gotta warm the belly.

Oh man, I just replaced the whole massive React frontend for my little Raspberry Pi dashboard display with HTML and Vue in 80 lines of code: https://github.com/VirtualWolf/pi-home-dashboard/blob/master/public/index.html

And now it's all bundled up into the one Docker container along with the backend without any additional fucking around! Looking back on it, I'm not sure why I decided to go with React for that, it's MASSIVELY overkill. I suspect due to a lack of knowing anything else.

My ESP32 sensor reader is pretty much done (https://github.com/VirtualWolf/esp32-sensor-reader)! I'm just going to leave it running for a week or so and see what happens. Might set up a separate "staging" version of my website on my Linode as well, so it has to post updates out over the internet and I can see how it handles the vagaries and random errors of that.

(I also wrote a little Node.js IRC bot using raw sockets a while back, that was fun too! https://github.com/VirtualWolf/weatherbot)

My little ESP32 sensor reader project is implementing a web server by writing to the HTTP specification with raw sockets, and it's quite fascinating being this low-level.