Scott O'Brien

Mechanical Keyboard pt 1

I've always wanted to build a mechanical keyboard from scratch. I've always had a personal and work computer, and a KVM to switch between the two. I'd try to avoid having any personal accounts logged into my work computer, but have found it too annoying to switch the entire display over when I want to check a quick e-mail or respond to a chat message.

nrf52840-devboard

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When working on my keyboard project, it's dawned on me how hard it is to build such a big project from scratch, and how I wish there was a breakout for the Holyiot 18010 nRF52840 controller, so, let's build one! This will be a good test bed for the USB connection, and charge controller too! Hopefully it can act as a proof of concept for everything that's going to go in my keyboard.

This page is to document my learnings from the ZMK Design Guide

NextJS Website

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A friend of mine made fun of me for re-writing my website so many times, the latest iteration this time around is in NextJS. It moves my old Hugo blog to a new React, Tailwind CSS website with Typescript.

mini-cnc

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After crashing my RC Plane I decided to experiment with the flight controller using the cheapest possible RC planes I could build.

I bought foam board from Dollar Tree. Having the free designs from Flite Test (I’m using their Simple Cub), it quickly became apparent that printing out the designs, cutting, lining them up, gluing, cutting takes hours and hours to cut out a design.

Ardupilot Postmortem

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A big thanks to those who helped from the Ardupilot Forum

Last week, I took a few extra days off from work to give myself a nice long break over Thanksgiving week.

I spent a lot of time finishing an RC plane we had some replacement parts for. This one was going to be autonomous. I spent a few days soldering the flight controller and electronics, gluing the plane together, measuring and trimming everything perfectly. It was perfectly balanced, perfectly weighted. We finally took it out for its maiden flight today, Sunday November 27. Sadly, this story ends in pieces.

workflow-orchestration

At Meta, we have a few internal workflow orchestration engines. The idea is to allow long-running jobs, or things that can be split into tasks and need to have safe "checkpoints" behind them be defined in a system that can safely execute them and make sure they're executed in a durable, reliable and scalable way.

rockwool-stand

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Last time I did hydroponic growing and germinated seeds in the rockwool, I found it annoying that the roots would grow out the bottom of the rockwool, then get squished by the ground, making it harder to have dangling roots to easily transfer to an NFT system.

learning-rust

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In Network Engineering at Facebook Meta, we've been going through an interesting transformation in which we're starting to be discouraged to write new services in Python, and, instead start writing more in Rust (and sorry Golang, of which we've already got a bit written in.)

ESPChess NewGame Bug

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Ordering is a little off here, but I wanted to writeup about a bug I'm seeing in the ESPChess project (post to come) and how I intend to fix it.

NFT Hydroponic System

As my hydroponic experiemnt has shown success, I wanted to scale this up. My plan is to build an NFT hydroponic system for the yard, and dutch bucket for tomatoes.

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