lately - 20260212

hackathon, drums, rice, classes

i think i'm gonna try and do these monthly...

swamphacks recap

a couple weeks back i participated in SwampHacks, my university's annual hackathon. we didn't win anything, but i was able to work more with microcontrollers, firmware, and get a better grasp on circuitry. i don't want to be repetitive (since you can read the devpost here), but my team and i developed an accessible controller for teenagers with fine motor skills.

due to a myriad of things (primarily lack of communication, since the person in charge of 3D printing stright up told us he was "ignoring" our model, despite promising it'd be printed the morning of the second day), we weren't able to finish. regardless, we pushed through and made good progress. we plan to actually get it fully working within the month now that we've all settled in to classes. tinyusb is a pain in the ass to set up since everything needs to be configured exactly, so i plan on working on that ASAP to get it registered as an actual gamepad (right now it's only able to serially debug input).

pod

PoD, or PicO Drums, is a MIDI drumkit i'm actively working on to work around the over-priced kits that plague the market today. theoretically, they're finished, but because the Pico has only 3 ADCs i need to mux the inputs through, well, a mux. still ironing that out, but i have the circuit done and have a rough skeleton of the firmware based on the Pico docs.

pretty rough draft of the chassis, but since foam is expensive as hell for no reason i decided to go with two rugs i got from Ross to have the rubber drum-head sort of deal that a lot of MIDI kits use.

white and blue rice

i nuked an old laptop and riced Fedora. not much else to say. i think i got past my hatred for XFCE after ricing it to the nines, but so far it's been alright. i definitely prefer a TWM, but having a gui for certain things is nice (as much as i'm a command line truther...).

classes, i guess

not much to say, honestly just including it here since i mentioned it last post. i ended up dropping the DSP class (unfortunately) in favor of an embedded systems course. i might've taken Advanced Systems Programming instead had i known about its existence (since it's referred to as 'OS 2.0', my favorite core CS class, by my peers), but it's alright. with that being said, i definitely want to do some systems projects this semester, so we'll see how that goes.

anyways, if you remember me mentioning penetration testing from last time, i'm happy to say i've since discovered a love for cybersecurity. it's essentially all the things i find cool or interesting about computers, plus rewarding being nosy, all wrapped into one. we've had 2 practicals so far, 4 labs, and a handful of other assignments, but it's made me start to seriously consider going for certifications (although they are quite expensive) to break into the industry.