The Wrew: Core Dump

Every once in a while a project will require some soldering.

Probably an unfair assumption, but any time I see automated attack / recon scans against my websites I immediately assume it's a script kiddie somewhere in the world.

It's been a minute since I've written anything here - a whole week if I'm not mistaken!

While I wait for the final components for the hackers.town pager to arrive (some I thought would work did not actually so had to re-source) I’ve started initial work on the schematics for the revision 2.0 hardware.

Two posts in one day?!

As my adventures with electronics have evolved over the last year, I've learned a lot and grown a lot in what I can do and achieve.

I've been re-watching Battlestar Galactica (the Ronald D.

I've been inspired lately by watching my buddy Ben Brown as he's built a custom firmware for his Lilygo T-LoRa Pager (after being inspired by me to acquire said pager!)

Sometimes it’s small things that make me smile.

One of the things I've not really been able to do while developing SpectraMesh has been test the actual real world range of the radio links.

I'd had high hopes for a productive weekend, but those were dashed upon awaking Saturday morning with a sudden and insistent urge to puke my guts out.

I've taken on a lot of projects over the last year - some I've managed to complete, while others are long lived and ongoing.

As I've been building out SpectraMesh one of the things I've had to do the most of is develop firmware for different radios that are available.

All day Tuesday I had some wicked fatigue - more than I could really explain.

Sometimes when building firmware for a piece of hardware things go wrong.

It's been a few minutes since I posted anything about the hackers.town pager and where things stand with that.

Firmware development is challenging sometimes.

I've had multiple nRF52 based radio boards arrive this past week, three to be exact, and I've somehow managed to brick all three in the course of three days while trying to flash firmware onto them.

Between ADHD, getting older, and having kids constantly distracting me... it's ridiculously easy these days for me to forget things.

A cool idea came to me this weekend while considering setting up my drone detector again after taking it down to use the mesh radio part of it to test SpectraMesh.

For Spectra Mesh I had a need for companion apps to do the actual messaging over the supported radios.

I've had this site up and running for... almost two years now, and it's kinda felt like it needed a little bit of a refresh.

This week I got my hands on a Lilygo T-Beam Supreme LoRa radio - an effort to expand the catalog of hardware that I officially support for SpectraMesh.

I'm a few days late in writing and posting this, mainly because I've been busy with a lot on my plate and just haven't had time to do it.

I thought I'd write about a new problem that has cropped up in the Spectra Mesh network that I'm in the process of addressing - time drift!

Yesterday I fixed an issue with Spectra that dealt with its TDMA implementation, and thought it might make an interesting topic for a blog post - what did I find and how did I fix it?

As I've written about a few times here, I've recently been working on a project called Spectra that's a bridge for LoRa mesh networks like Meshtastic and Meshcore.

You may look at the title of this post and think that I'm talking about little decorated eggs that are hidden for kids to find.... and you're partially right, in that it is a reference to hidden things, but in this post I'm not talking about actual eggs...

As some of you will remember, I re-entered the job search market back in December and have been on the hunt for a new adventure ever since.

Spectra is the name I settled on for the project that started as the Veilid Meshcore Bridge.

Since I decided to pivot on the Veilid - Meshcore bridge running on the ESP32 I've been able to rapidly build V2 using components from v1, but utilizing a slightly different architectural approach that I think will end up working a LOT better long term.

Earlier today I decided I was going to throw in the towel on my project to build a bridge between MeshCore and Veilid running on an ESP32.

The work I've been doing to get Veilid to work on the ESP32 has finally paid off as I finally figured out the things that were really hindering performance and making it seem like the ESP32 might not be a worthwhile platform for Veilid.

I've talked about it before, and will talk about it again in the future I'm sure... but one of the tenets of the hacker community I'm part of is the ideology of 'always be n00bin'', essentially a reminder to always be learning, trying new things, and don't

I've been enjoying the ESP32-S3 as a platform.

Living in San Francisco for the last 10 years or so has given me lots of opportunities to hear about new startups and new technologies.

Ring cameras have become rather pervasive as many homeowners decided to get them as a security measure.

With the hardware manufacturing nearing completion, last week I dove back into working on VoidMantisOS and getting it ready for prime time.

It's been a while since I've posted anything about Project Retro, the hackers.town pager I've been working on for the last half year.

I make no attempt to hide the fact that I've got pretty heavy ADHD.

One thing all of my various projects have in common is that they all serve a purpose and solve a problem in some way.

I've been back on the job market for about a month now, and submitted more resumes and applications than I can even remember.

I wrote yesterday morning about Omega SCA, a tool for performing software composition analysis that I built so I could manage my supply chain risks for my various projects.

Most of the projects I take on are for fun reasons - a prank or practical joke, or learning something new, or something to share with friends.

I've been thinking recently about social media, and how they've been used to cause a lot of harm.

Several years back I was brought in on a project, Veilid, that was about to be launched.

My wife does most of the cooking in our house.

Last night was field test number 2 of the hackers.town pager - and it was just as successful as field test 1!

Last night I decided to try building a proof of concept of how we could allow for third party "apps" to be loaded dynamically by VoidMantisOS.

As I'm on the job hunt I decided it might be a good time to build a small website to highlight the projects I've worked on over the last year.