George White stonehippo

Things I've done to pretty up my terminal

installed bat
added $ZSH_CUSTOM/cat-alias.zsh cat="/PATH/TO/bat"
set omz theme to bureau

Some Rust cross-compiling resources for Raspberry Pi

As I work on setting up a Pi Zero W as a little portable system for some lightweight dev, I'm running the challenge of compiling certain binaries on-system. To say that the Pi Zero W's resources are limited is an understatement; it can take days to compile something that might take minutes on a more robust system.

What I wanted was to cross-compile Microsoft Edit. I got it working by installing rust on my Raspberry Pi 400 with the 64-bit OS, then adding the appropriate target:

rustup target add arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

Static Site Generators

I have a couple of projects that I am working on that I think will be ideal for a static site generator (SSG). As I evaluate my options, I'll capture some notes here.

There's a whole list of SSGs on the Jamstack site.

Standslone SSGs

Jekyll - Ruby; one of the OG SSGs
Blot - Javascropt (mostly) available as a service or deployed locally

CircuitPython Blinka Guides

Blinka is a compatibility layer for CircuitPython that provides the CircuitPython APIs for other flavors of Python, including CPython and MicroPython.

There are several Blinka compatible boards out there. Plus, with the right hardware—such as an FT232H or MCP2221 breakout, or even a Raspberry Pi Pico or another RP2040 dev board—Blinka works with PCs running Linux, MacOS, or Windows.

Blinka Documentation & Source

Blinka is maintained on Github:

Downloading a bunch of videos from TikTok on macOS

First, get homebrew if you don't already have it.

Then, in your terminal, get things set up:

cd ~/Downloads
mkdir tiktok_stuff
cd tiktok_stuff

Setting up CircuitPython to talk to devices via Bluetooth LE

If you have a CircuitPython development board that has Bluetooth LE (Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE) compatibility, it is fairly easy to get it connected a phone or PC over a virtual UART (for simple, text-based communications.

Dependencies

In addition to a CircuitPython-compatible development board that supports Bluetooth LE, you'll need to have CircuitPython installed. The build of CP for your board needs to include the _bleio library; you can check to see if you're board is supported here.

You will most likely want to install a few support libraries for working with BLE (the first one is required, the second is optional but highly recommended). You can install these with circup or get them from the CircuitPython library bundle

Installing Adafruit CircuitPython Blinka on a modern MacOS

Adafruit Blinka is a CircuitPython compatability layer for standard Python (CPython) on desktops, laptops, and single board computers. Installing Blinka is a great way to access the hardware drivers and other helpers available in CircuitPython. For example, CP has a very nice interface to Bluetooth LE that can make setting up your laptop as a central device much easier!

See Adafruit's installation guide for more details on setting up Blinka. You might also want to tale a look at the guides below for methods for setting up Blinka with computers for hardware hacking:

	from machine import Pin
	from neopixel import NeoPixel
	import time

	pixels = NeoPixel(Pin(0), 12, bpp=4)

	WHITE = (0,0,0,255)
	RED = (255,0,0,0)
	GREEN = (0,255,0,0)
	BLUE = (0,0,255,0)

	import asyncio
	import time

	import board

	import neopixel
	from rainbowio import colorwheel

	import adafruit_lsm303_accel
	import adafruit_lis2mdl