Trying to track when you last completed a long-dated task can be challenging. Writing them on a calendar makes for difficult searching. Heavy apps are overkill. So what’s a person to do? A simple soltution - use NFC tags which are pre-loaded with custom JSON, drop a little golang server, and Docker persistance with MySQL, along with a Grafana UI to easily manage tracking of tasks.
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So you want to get into rust? Sure, why not. Let’s do it.
Assuming you’re on a Mac, let’s get rust up and running so you’re ready to rip into learning the language. We’ll use rustup to install rust. This is the best way to manage your rust environment and toolchain. Not only can you manage toolchains using rustup, but also add-in components to make the experience a lot more enjoyable. More on that later. Not only will rustup install rust for you, but it will also be useful for maintaining the latest versions of rust. Rust has several toolchains, and using rustup will make maintaining them a whole lot easier.
Take a look at the function below that computes a mystery value for the function $f(x)$. Any idea what the function is? Take a close look at the first line where we create a channel. Notice that the channel isn’t some boring int or string channel. No, this is a channel of type func(int, chan int, chan bool). Wait what??? That’s right, this channel takes a function that takes an integer and two channels as function parameters. We define such a function, x, right aftewards.
In this blog post, I follow-up on the ESP32-IDF development and demonstrate how to incorporate an i2c device to measure the temperature and humidity. Specifically the SHT31. First, let’s do it plain-jane vanilla. We’ll incorporate the i2c device and simply display the measurements to the serial terminal through the uart. Next, we’ll make it more practical and send the data over the wifi network to a service that makes it convenient to visualize the time-series data.
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Go out and buy yourself a cheap little ESP32 SoC and follow these basic instructions to setup your development environment on your Mac. If you want to do some advanced C-programming to control your ESP32, this is for you. If you’d rather use Arduino and play with simple sketches then this is not for you – google how to use Arduino and off you go!
So, of course you’ll need an ESP32 SoC development board. I recommend the SparkFun Thing. Lots of other choices, but this blog post will address some of the specific configuration considerations that you’ll need to be aware of when you select this particular device.
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As Yoda once said…
> YAPL - yet another programming language. Learn something new, you must.
Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. As such, it’s an interesting programming language to take a look at as it’s a serious contender for certain classes of programming problems; most notibly, scientific and data-centric analysis.
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In this blog post, I’ll share my experiences using the Teensy and TGA-Pro Guitar Audio Shield to process audio - both using an audio processing codec as well as MIDI. I’ve also included the Yamaha UX16 USB-to-MIDI controller to aid in patching my MIDI channels into the inputs of the Guitar Audio shield.
At the hear of this project is the Teensy 3.6 USB Microcontroller development board. This sub-$30 board is a feature-rich micro-controller using the Cortex M4, floating-point unit, digital and analog pins, and lots of communication protocols (USB, i2C, SPI, Serial, Ethernet). What makes this little USB-attached board so useful are the accompanying software elements:
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