Recent updates:

Trying out Ponoko and the FreeCAD Laser Cut Interlocking workbench in 7 minutes
tl;dr: The Laser Cut Interlocking workbench is the first tool I've found that feels like it might make the process of designing three dimensional structures to be laser cut easier. And Ponoko is kinda neat once you get past the $14 per-order charge Why is laser cutting cool? I should probably…

Gate driver test: PWM switching a half-amp at 80 kHz PWM with a MOSFET 1 week ago
tl;dr: At 80 kHz where the MOSFET switches 0.5A at 5V, a gate driver makes a small but measurable difference in switching speed. It makes a clear difference in heat generated as you switch increasing amounts of power. It's better to do PWM at a high frequency. Ideally, you want the frequency to be…

A vaguely finished ESPHome node for my geekroom 1 week ago
Some five months ago , I wrote about how I got started with ESPHome with an ESP8266 and a temperature/humidity sensor on a breadboard. I figured that I'd build it over time. I'd realize that there would be something that would be really nice to add, and so I'd find some parts to do it, or try out…

Making an ATMega32U4 Arduino clone board from scratch 1 week ago
So far, the Ardunio environment seems to be the easiest way for me to get real and practical things done with hardware, most of which has to do with there being a decent open-source library for most of the things that I could write but don't want to. I've never actually purchased a real Arduino…

The missing bits for how to make a QMK macro pad from scratch: Writing a firmware for a custom board 1 month ago
At some point, I was linked to Ruiqi Mao's guide on how to make a keyboard PCB in KiCad and kinda filed in the back of my head the idea of doing that. Because, honestly, PCB design is kinda fun. Eventually, I decided there were enough interesting reasons all coupled to making a ATMega32u4 board…