Posts

Claude can write MicroPython just fine. The annoying part is everything after that, getting the code onto a board, connecting to the REPL, figuring out why the pin numbers are wrong, iterating. I wanted Claude to be able to do all of that itself, talk directly to the hardware while I watch. ViperIDE is a browser-based IDE for MicroPython and CircuitPython by Volodymyr Shymanskyy. It connects to devices over USB, Bluetooth, or WiFi and gives you a file manager, editor, and REPL terminal. If you haven’t tried MicroPython before it’s one of the easier ways to get started. ...

I’m writing this blog post on my Pixel 5, standing in the kitchen. Termux open, connected to my home server through three layers of infrastructure that make the whole thing feel like I’m sitting at my desk. The same Claude Code session I started on my workstation this morning is right here on a 6" screen, and I can type a prompt, put the phone down, come back in an hour, and nothing has dropped. ...

MicroPython has about 1500 open issues across its repos. Some of them have been there for years. A bunch are duplicates of each other, a bunch more are already fixed by PRs that got merged without anyone linking them back, and a pretty solid chunk are just noise (support questions, cross-posts, wrong-repo stuff). Nobody’s going to sit down and manually review 1500 issues against 8000+ PRs looking for connections though. ...

A colleague had just reached a critical milestone, getting a stable LVGL-based UI running on our product’s 5" MIPI display. It was a significant piece of driver work: MicroPython application code on an NXP i.MX RT1176 (Cortex-M7 @ 1 GHz), driving LVGL v9 on a 720x1280 MIPI DSI touchscreen. An embedded system, not a phone or PC. The UI worked, but the on-screen keyboard was unusable. Each keypress took nearly 200ms to render, dropping to 1-2 FPS while typing, missing many keypresses entirely. For context, touchscreen input generally needs 30+ FPS (under 33ms per frame) to feel responsive, and 60+ FPS to feel smooth. We were at 5 FPS on a good frame. That performance is unusable for a client demo, let alone a shipping product, and without any obvious cause for the lag it wasn’t clear if we had a fundamental hardware/design failure or a fixable configuration issue. ...

I recently got a Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370 and 56GB of LPDDR5x RAM. I wanted to see what I could actually run on it for local LLM inference, and it turns out you can run pretty large models if you know how to get around a couple of gotchas with the AMD iGPU memory model. The short version: I’m running Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (a 35 billion parameter MoE model) and Gemma-4-26B-A4B (26B, also MoE) locally, served as an OpenAI-compatible API accessible from other machines on my network. No discrete GPU required. I’ve since put them to work on a real batch classification task (triaging ~4000 GitHub issues for the MicroPython project) and compared their output quality against Claude Sonnet. ...

I’ve been using Claude Code daily for months now. It writes most of my code, documentation, commit messages, PR descriptions. The code is great. The prose, not so much. Not because it’s bad writing, it’s perfectly competent. The problem is it sounds like AI. Every PR description comes out with “This PR implements…” and “Additionally…” and perfect parallel structure across all bullet points. It’s polished in a way that I’m not, and that’s exactly what makes it obvious. ...

Handy is a local voice-to-text desktop app by @cjpais that I’ve been contributing to for a few months. Push a key, speak, release, and whatever you said appears at the cursor. No cloud, no API key, no latency across the wire. The transcription is done by transcribe-rs, a Rust crate that wraps a handful of ASR engines (whisper, Parakeet, SenseVoice, Canary, openai) behind a unified interface. ...

Baratza Vario / Forte Motor drive parts and ratio Motor Baratza have at least 3 variants of motor used in the Vario… and 120V/230V versions of each: * PN: 1036 / 1037 D-shaft motor * PN: 1058? / ?? Helical shaft motor * PN: 6026 / 6027 Hybrid shaft motor There’s also two styles of motor enclosure used: not sure if these relate to specific part numbers above or not though, or it might be a Mahlkonig vs Baratza difference. ...

I’m quite a fan of my Sunbeam Torino It looks great and has a lot of solid features like dosed shot buttons, pour timer, pressure gauge, PID adjustable temperature control, quick warmup, strong steam and a full size (58mm) group head. When the Torino first launched, it did not review well, on CS the response was generally quite brutal… Sunbeam trying to sell it for AUD$2000 put it up against a lot of big names in the industry and people in the know didn’t seem to think it matched up at all. ...

At work we needed to certify a BLE device recently. We had the legacy PTS dongle provided by Bluetooth SIG, however I found it only supports testing devices up the BLE 4.2 So we need a new BLE Dongle - they now only support the Laird Connectivity | 451-00004 https://store.bluetooth.com/ This is normally stocked by all the online electronics distributers; element14, digikey, mouser, arrow etc. Unfortunately it was out of stock on all of them, for about 4 months. ...