The past year has been wild. I found my dream house and moved into it. Starting to clear away land to build a growing dome for food production, settling in to the sleepy little town I've found myself choosing as the place to spend the rest of my life. It's quaint and idyllic here, the kind of place that's a close community without being exclusive or unwelcoming. I found my place here, and I'm quite content with it.
Part of this has meant spending a lot of time adjusting to homeownership and less time tinkering with projects on the bench, though the past month or so has presented a gradual shift to the latter. As winter approaches, I find myself subconsciously preparing for days with less sky and more screen. While the earth tucks itself into her deep slumber, I'll be spending my time honing contraptions and creating things that make me smile.
Looking over this site, there are some updates I should probably make. Not so much out of obligation, but more to keep myself occupied and continuing to make the things I want to see in the world. I've abandoned my feelings of guilt over being "not productive" just because I'm not constantly publishing or hitting milestones on the things I do. It occurred to me that I can just do what I want to, when I want to, and tinkering doesn't have to be some kind of surrogate hustle.
Current Stuff:
Finally finished wiring up the keyboard for Faux-P1, which was a bit tedious because I was using the snap-off ortho Neokey PCBs from Adafruit in a layout that definitely is not a neat grid, so they had to be rewired back together. In this process, I decided I didn't care about having RGB lights on all of the keys because I didn't feel like rewiring the data lines on all of the segments in addition to the column/row lines. Lessons learned. So the control surface is basically ready to go, I just need to wire it all to a microcontroller and stand up Zynthian on a spare raspi.
I've always wanted a physical verison of Rebirth RB-338 and decided I should probably just make one. So Lazarus LZ-676 is currently in the works - this one will be based around a pair of Teensy 4.1 boards, one for MIDI and one for the audio engine. So far I've got all of the components in hand and I'm slowly wiring it all up on a 40x30cm perfboard. Apparently I didn't quite have my fill of wiring dozens of switches with Faux-P1, because Lazarus also has 64 of them to be wired too. Yes, it's tedious, but I've learned how to embrace it and get meditative.
Wirewrap is dope and I wish I had done it sooner. Pretty much everything I've been doing has been wirewrap on perfboard, which leads to lots of boards stacked on boards and is a bit ugly under the hood. But I don't care if it's ugly; it's mine and I love it. I'm starting to develop a love of doing things sloppy, but doing them anyways. This will probably translate to more things being built to completion instead of being half-built and paralyzed by perfectionism.
I deployed a Faircamp server in preparation for Jamuary. Every year, I mean to make music and share it and every year I don't do it. I don't want to do that again this time around. I want to make half-assed weird bloopy noises and post them for people to hear, and I stopped caring about whether or not it would be "good" or "marketable" or "worth it" - I just want to have fun creating things again.
Been reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, and I'm loving it as a leftist spiritual successor to Snow Crash. I'm only about a third of the way through it, but it's grabbing me in ways that a book hasn't done for quite some time.
There is an election happening. Fascism is still somehow on the ballot. Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, though the general vibe seems to be leaning more towards the former.
I'll update the actual project pages here once I feel like it (probably some time this weekend).
