This has been my longest break from posting on HFL since I started writing this blog in 2023. Forgive me, I’ve been busy. I have spent my entire life in the Midwest, and most of it near the Great Lakes. So, the move to California has perhaps been a wilder ride than it would be for someone else. My wife and I have given an open invitation to our friends and family to visit, and several of them have taken us up on that deal. They’re certainly more excited to visit us in the Bay than they were to visit us in Milwaukee. Go figure.

I have lots of thoughts about this place, but I haven’t lived here long enough for my judgement to mean much. If you want to hear someone from middle America bitch about the West Coast, go read your uncle’s Facebook. It feels completely foreign in some ways, and in other ways it’s pretty similar.

The new job is a lot of work, none of which I can talk about here. Suffice to say I make your laptop’s power button work, among other things. I have meetings with people in East Asia and India, and that takes up the evenings I used to spend tinkering and writing. I’m hoping to return to my usual monthly-ish cadence for new posts, but they won’t all be project-based. I simply don’t have enough time for that.

It’s not all work, though. Although it’s tough to find the extended free time that I need for my projects, but I’ve found other things to fill what little time I have. I built a gaming PC for the living room in February, and I must confess that this post would have come out sooner if I hadn’t spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Civilization V on it. There will be a post about that computer soon.

I’ve also started gardening. We have a patio with just enough room for a planter box and a couple pots. I’m growing cherry tomatoes, lettuce, basil, rosemary, pepperocinis, chilis, coleus, and a gardenia. It’s grown (heh) into quite an operation.

I also bought a vintage Japanese road bike:

It’s all original, which is very cool… but the brakes were also original, which was not very cool, so I replaced those. The tires were severely dry-rotted when I bought it, so I also had to replace those. While I didn’t need to replace the seat, 1970s bike seats are awful so I replaced that too. I also spent hours with a wad of aluminum foil and some soapy water, scrubbing all the surface rust off the chrome.

As it turns out, a 50 year old bicycle is not the most practical thing to use as transportation. Who knew! I love the way it looks, so it’s worth the fuss. I haven’t owned a bicycle since college, so it’s been good fun and a hell of a workout. It might make another appearance here some day, as I continue wrenching on it.

So where does that leave the Tiny Telco project?

I fully intend to return to Tiny Telco. It’s been a blast to work on, and every step has been more satisfying than the last. I haven’t been able to make any progress because I haven’t had my lab space. It’s still a mess of boxes, and I only have about half the desk space of my old lab. But, it’s coming together.

It’ll take some time to ease back into the groove. In the meantime, I’m working on some smaller projects while I ramp up my new workspace to bear the load of a long-term project. For example, I made some Ikea cube shelves light up, Technology Connections style:

I’m also working on redesigning a board that a FIRST Robotics team uses to teach incoming students how to solder. Quite a bit simpler than Tiny Telco, but the prototyping phase will require me to go through many of the same motions.

While I haven’t been able to work on it directly, I have been thinking about the Tiny Telco project a lot. I’m strongly considering a return to the STM32F7-based prototype. It just worked so much better. I think I’ll be able to achieve a much higher level of polish on the final product if I go the STM32 route.

The work that I’ve done so far on each subsystem can be repurposed for smaller offshoot projects, too. There are also tons of fun and useful things I could make using the parts I’ve already designed. Expect to see some offshot projects this year.

Also, I’m buying a 3D printer.